Issue 3

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THE RED LINE

Greg Johansson Lori Hahnel Terri Favro Melissa Kuipers Thomas M. King And Gabriel WainoTheberge

I3 The End of The World

With Stories From

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Here it is, the third issue of the Red Line, formatted for your reading pleasure.

This time around, because we got so much quality feedback, we thought we would compile everything together in one readable format. We won’t waffle on right now about how delighted we are with the writers and readers that have taken part so far. Nor will we waffle on about the growing interest in the magazine that we are seeing, and we won’t bore you right now with our plans for the future.

Instead we will keep this first consolidated issue relatively simple, and keep it all about the stories and the feedback. So, first up (below) is the overall feedback we received from the post-apocalyptians including the winner. After this will be all of the stories, each followed by a the individual judges feedback on each one.

Now, we should take a minute to say that this feedback is unfiltered and frank.

Whether positive or negative, constructive feedback is gold-dust, so we have made a decision on behalf of all involved to stick with full disclosure.

Stephen & Toby The Red Line July 2013

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Winner: Snapshots of a Cold War Childhood Runners Up (in order): Sunday After noon Dr ive, Helen Ends The Wor ld, Little Ways You Could Tell The World Was Ending, Ice, Pacific Call Comments When it came to judging, there was definitely a clear winner. Snapshots of a Cold War Childhood was the first choice of all but one of the group. It’s a story that resonates with everyone and is immediately recognisable as a threat back then and a continued threat now. It’s a haunting and paranoid piece which has been very well written.

As well has having a definite winner, the story voted last place was almost unanimous – Pacific Call. This had a great concept if not quite fulfilling the brief and had some issues with language and grammar. Unfortunately this really does influence how the story is read. A good editor and a fully developed outline would have been of benefit here.

Trying to decide where other stories fit was a lot harder. We all more or less enjoyed them but they didn’t really stand out from each other. Although Gillian absolutely adored Little Ways You Could Tell The World Was Ending. Plenty of arguments happening here! Ice was a story that everyone really enjoyed but were confused as to why this was shortlisted. It was written really well with good general characterisation and themes but for us did not fit the brief. Helen Ends the World was charming and Sunday Afternoon Drive packed a lot into such a small amount of space.

In the end, I think we were all little bit disappointed as these stories didn’t really speak to us. Although there were themes and strong narratives, there was a distinct lack of imagination in both the end of the world and in the character’s reactions.

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Snapshots of a Cold War Childhood

by Terri Favro Snapshot number one is a black-and-white taken with a Kodak Brownie StarFlash. My three siblings are horsing around at the edge of the Niagara Gorge so, by process of elimination, that dazed looking baby stuffed into the stroller must be me. Mom waves a blurred hand in front of her face like a starlet shooing away a pesky photographer. On the picnic table beside her stands a sweating tallboy of Old Vienna beer – Dad must have set it down, mid-swig, to snap the picture. You can see the Bridal Veil Falls, better known as the American Falls, in the distance.

I was born in the middle of the big, fat fifties, a decade stuffed with lardy piecrusts, fluffernutters and fear. With the hands of the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight, I picked the wrong time to be born, and the wrong place: the Niagara Peninsula may have seemed a sleepy backwater, all fruit farms and factories, but as my father pointed out, “We’ll be the first to go.” His favourite magazine, Popular Science, said that nearby Niagara Falls was a first-strike target for the Soviets because the hydro generating station provided power to America’s eastern seaboard.

The possibility of death from above was a grey thundercloud on the robin’s-egg-blue sky of my childhood, starting with the basketball-sized Soviet satellite, Sputnik. We were born about a year apart: I, on October fifteenth, nineteen-fifty-six, Sputnik, on October fourth, nineteen-fifty-seven. I had barely blown out the candles on my first birthday cake when the Soviets were at it again, launching poor little Laika the dog on Sputnik II.

5 Down on Earth, I slept my cozy baby sleep, my capitalist cats curled in a box, safe from being blown into orbit. But the grown-ups had bigger worries than pets in space: the Soviets had the jump on us. They not only had the A-bomb, but, with Sputnik, eyes in the sky. Canada’s Civil Defense Department erected air raid sirens and delivered red-and-black flyers with a checklist to help us turn our cold cellars into bomb shelters: canned goods, radio, water, first aid kit. And they explained how to brace yourself for a nuclear attack: crouch against a good, solid wall and put your arms over your head.

I enjoyed looking at the drawings of the nuclear family in the preparedness flyer, the little girl taking cover in her crinoline dress. I guessed that the Russians had attacked while she was on her way to a birthday party.

“What happens if we can’t find the cats when it’s time to hide?” I asked my mother as she hung laundry near the cherry tree where my grandfather sprayed pesticide from a rusting tank on his back.

My mother spat out the clothespins she held in her mouth, and answered, “We’ll have to leave the cats to fend for themselves, dear.”

I ran crying into our house. That was my last memory of the fifties. I awoke to the sixties like Dorothy walking out of a black-and-white Kansas into a Kodachrome Oz that promised all the future possibilities my brother and I saw in Popular Science. Flying cars. Jet packs. Silver jumpsuits. I was especially looking forward to the moving sidewalks because the worms couldn’t slither out onto them after rainstorms.

Snapshot two, taken with a Kodak Instamatic: white cake, white candles, starched ruffles on my dress. My laughter reveals Pepsodent-perfect baby teeth. Unsmiling on either side of me, my grandparents look as weather-beaten as Roman ruins. Having left behind the dangers of one homeland, they must be pondering what to do about the iron sharks swimming in the sky.

Saving their family won’t be as easy as boarding a ship this time.

Everyone’s favourite NASA scientist, Wernher Von Braun, began appearing on Disney’s Wonderful World of Colour to prepare us for the World of Tomorrow. In his stiff Prussian accent, he explained the challenge of escaping Earth’s atmosphere - “Und now Goofy and Pluto vill enter the Mercury rocket…but look, they are veightless!”

The space race was the happy flipside on the long-play record of the nuclear arms build-up. We knew that if the superpowers blew up the Earth, we could escape to the Moon.

Snapshot three: my brother in the cockpit of a B-52 Bomber constructed from pieces of scrap wood, hanging by a rope from the crossbar of our clothesline pole. It must have been back-to-school time: grapevines are visible in the background, the fruit al-

6 most ready for picking.

I blew out six candles on the same day U.S. spy planes spotted Soviet missile silos in Cuba. The American President waited a week to reveal this secret to the rest of us. Gathered in the TV room, we learned that the world was on the brink of total annihilation.

In a twinkling, the Americans went to DEFCON 2 –– “Their highest danger level,” my brother explained. “The B-52s have been scrambled. It’s just a matter of time until Mutual Assured Destruction.” I could see his ears pinking up with excitement.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Everybody dies,” he answered.

I thought this sounded like a poorly plotted Action Comic until the church parking lot next door began to overflow with cars, even though it was only a Thursday. My brother and I went to the cold cellar to play board games – The Game of Life, Lie Detector, Concentration –– and wait for the end of the world. Why waste time on homework if we were going to die anyway?

Our father came down and ordered us to hit the books, which turned out to be a good thing; by Sunday the Russians had backed down. On Monday morning, we were in school, the church parking lot as empty as a roller skating rink. It was the way things were in those days: we’d tiptoe up to the edge of the abyss, then dance away again.

Snapshot four: Nuns look on as my class performs the Mexican Hat Dance in the school gymnasium, commemorating the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Air raid drills started in earnest. Our grade one teacher took us into the darkened hallways of our pre-fabricated elementary school and told us to crouch down and cover our heads. “Pray,” she said. “Pretend that the bombs are coming.”

I did as I was told, working myself into a panic, rushing through my Hail Marys. I imagined I could hear the up-down, up-down wailing of the town’s air raid siren.

I sniffed a sudden bathroom smell as one of the boys, pressed against the wall beside me, peed his pants.

Afterwards, we all went home for a hot lunch.

Snapshot five: A Yogi Bear punching bag looks on as my brother, sister and I watch TV. Dad is still using the Kodak Instamatic, a

7 workhorse of a camera.

High-pitched as a dentist’s drill, a thirty-second tone bled into our Saturday morning cartoons, followed by a voice reassuring us that this was a test, this was only a test. If this were a real emergency, you would receive instructions for Southern Ontario and the Niagara Frontier.

We knew that the Emergency Broadcast System tone would be the last thing we’d hear before atomic light flooded our cellars and crawlspaces, before our retinas scorched and our irradiated skin sloughed off like wet play dough One day, the alert would be real, but until then we could go back to laughing at the hapless Russian spies Boris and Natasha on The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show.

On hot summer nights, our town’s air raid siren would go off by accident –– often enough, that my father told us to ignore it. I’d call out, “I’m scared!” and my father would yell: “It’s a malfunction! Go back to sleep!”

I worried that the Emergency Broadcast System voice was telling us what to do. I left my bed and turned on the TV, but all I saw was the late news from Buffalo.

A concerned voice wanted to know: It’s 11 o’clock -- do you know where your children are?

Snap six should have been a home movie of us at Wasaga Beach, shot with my father’s Bolex 8-millimetre movie camera. Instead, it features unknown children (two boys, one girl) riding bikes in a naked-looking subdivision. Half-built split levels sprawl behind yards covered in bare earth. The trees are shorter than the kids.

Nuclear annihilation was not our only childhood worry. We also feared being overrun by Communists, of having to conform to their grey, uniform sameness. My brother bought second-hand comic books from the ‘fifties that imagined an alternate history in which North America had fallen to Khrushchev. The stories were about teachers being brainwashed and mothers being taken away from their children and sent off to work on collective farms.

It was clear that, if Communism took hold, it was all over for our almost American way of life. Never again would we enjoy a carefree holiday at Wasaga Beach, as captured on my father’s new home movie camera. But when he sent in our film for processing, instead of us at the beach, Kodak mailed back a movie of skinny kids hamming it up on bikes. We had no idea who or where they were. My father spliced it onto our vacation reel just the same; why waste film? The kids looked like us, anyway: same haircuts, same clothes, same eyeglasses. No wonder the guys in the lab got people’s home movies mixed up.

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Snap eight was taken with a Polaroid Land Camera by my brother-in-law, who was almost a priest but instead decided to marry my sister and write computer code. A diorama of Neil Armstrong stepping down from the Lunar Lander is set up in lobby of the brake lining plant where our father worked. Armstrong looks oddly carefree. A sign says he is on loan from Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum of Niagara Falls.

The hands of the Doomsday Clock kept moving, sometimes closer to midnight, sometimes further away. Through it all, crew-cutted angels with Texan accents rose to Heaven and fell to Earth.

Mercury. Gemini. Apollo. We never missed a mission, kneeling in the TV’s yellow glow with our processed cheese sandwiches and tumblers of Tang. We would watch the familiar ritual of the booster rocket detaching itself and falling away, the men with their white shirts and pocket protectors and black glasses, applauding and hooting and throwing ballpoints in the air. Best of all, we’d see the astronauts themselves, their easy, confident voices speaking to us from the soundlessness of space.

On Christmas Eve, nineteen-sixty-eight, Apollo Eight entered lunar orbit, went around the Moon a few times, and came home. “Just a test drive,” my father explained. “No fancy stuff.”

Astronauts Anders, Lovell and Borman read from the Book of Genesis to let the whole world know that humans had a new home: In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth…

As they read the familiar words, we saw cheese-shaped slices of the Moon through the pie-shaped window of the capsule, tantalizingly close.

That following summer, when Neil Armstrong’s puffy foot stepped down into the lunar dust, followed by a bouncing Buzz Aldrin, it was almost anticlimactic. Afterwards, my brother and I rushed outside to watch explosions of red-white-blue fireworks at the church next door, as if God was celebrating the dawn of an era when humans could stand a few million miles closer to Heaven and take Kodachromes of the Earth, tourists in the Sea of Tranquility. We stretched out on lawn chairs and faced the stars, talking of space stations and lunar colonies. Our enemy beaten, we knew our destiny was to get off the Earth and live on the Moon.

What a surprise, then, to be Earthbound all these years.

Our dreams of space exploration – if we dream them at all – are measured now. Cautious. Realistic. Who wants to risk the dangers of a mission to Mars when we can watch robots rove the red surface from our cellphones?

9 The only way for me to get back that sense of space age adventure is to look at old snapshots and home movies. They we are, flying scrap wood B-52s bombers, or space-walking through the back yard, pretending to be Shepherd or Glenn or poor dead Gus Grissom.

But as children of the cold war, that hopeful picture of life in space was scribbled over with visions of Armageddon.

Having gobbled up paranoia with our breakfast cereal every morning, we grew up quietly believing that something deadly was about to fall on us out of the sky.

Not the bomb anymore, of course. Just something.

Even though the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists sets the hands of the Doomsday Clock at a slightly alarming five minutes to midnight, we no longer worry about Mutual Assured Destruction –– also known as the end of the world. Our fears today are smaller and more diverse.

We’re anxious about our children, who can’t go exploring without an escort. They live indoor lives, isolated in the safety of climate-controlled homes. Many of them never see the stars.

We’re terrified of our bodies, which betray us by growing a little bit older every day. This deterioration was never supposed to happen to us, inheritors of an ever-youthful, candy-coloured, jet-packed future.

We’re afraid of our enemies – if only we knew who they were. One thing is sure: like Communists, some of them live among us, hidden in plain sight.

We’re afraid of money. Not just how hard it is to make it, but how easy it is to lose it. To our surprise, it doesn’t grow on trees.

And the trees are in trouble, too, the old Earth being stripped, poisoned and slowly cooked to death, like a medieval saint.

Welcome to the anxiety-ridden World of Tomorrow, complete with the occasional moving sidewalk, but without the lunar geodesic domes, silver jumpsuits or unflagging faith in progress.

When one lonely air raid siren was discovered on a Toronto rooftop a few summers ago, it was treated with a combination of amusement and nostalgia. A relic of a long-forgotten time.

But I haven’t forgotten. Not really. Fear acquired in childhood is like muscle memory. Like playing an arpeggio, or twirling a baton. Practiced long enough, it hardens into a habit you never lose.

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Feedback on “Snapshots of a Cold War Childhood” Liam Hogan: Well written, this tackles the reason why - for a certain generation at least - the idea of the apocalypse is ever present. It is a piece not about the end of the world, but what effects the idea of the end of the world has. This ominous threat is introduced early, even against what seems otherwise a rural but idyllic childhood, a threat made more real by the school drills and preparations. Despite the mechanism of the snapshots to advance time, it skips forward rather abruptly from the end of the narrator's childhood to the here and now, summarising some of the lingering effects of the paranoia, and then rather tamely ends.

There are a number of points it could end at which would be a little stronger I think; I'd plump for the "Welcome to the anxietyridden World of Tomorrow" paragraph, perhaps shift some of the last two around to make that work. But a strong emotive piece with lots of clever and wry observations. Well done!

Lucy Blackburn: 1. Very touching depiction of family life during the Cold War. There are moments of humour which are almost farcical given the context.

2. Not sure the narrative structure quite worked. It felt contrived in places.

Overall: Bittersweet account of growing up during the Cold War. it's powerful because it's timeless: the Cold War is over but we are living in a world with numberless unnamed fears. The question you're forced to ask yourself is: are we better off?

Jason Pursey: Snapshots is brilliantly charming and full of personal touches and affectations that make it read like a true memoir. The motif of the pictures as progression through the years is used well and helps pacing and framing of the events. The detail throughout the piece is evocative, without becoming too derivative or cliched; these additions instead sell the reader on the world in which the story is set without cluttering the narrative.

That narrative itself is wisely kept straightforward, given the short format. The characterisation is generally the standard archetypes – the knowing father, the rambunctious brother – but these work in the context as familiar touchstone characters.

The end feels a little rushed, and the “modern” comparison comes off somewhat superficial. The ambiguity of modern life has become a common theme in contemporary fiction and there isn't really enough space in this format to cover new ground. I felt that there could have been at least a tongue-in-cheek continuation of the photography theme with reference to instagram, or the like.

Overall a very enjoyable piece, which shows a lot of potential. Given more space I would enjoy seeing this story developed with some more details to the family, particularly more insight to the mother and father.

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Will Robertson: I liked I think this story very effectively evokes this fascinating period – where the promise of limitless progress coexisted with the threat of total destruction. I loved the use of language – capitalist cats vs unlucky Laika the dog, and the glorious first sentence of the second paragraph.

I felt the use of photographs to tell a story worked well and didn’t feel forced, and I liked the understated acceptance of possible doom which runs through the story – as it must have run through such a childhood.

I didn’t like: Perhaps the story’s closing paragraphs felt weaker than the rest – but perhaps I just resented them for pulling me away from this world of possibility into a modern world which has failed to live up to expectations. And since that’s exactly what they’re supposed to do, I can’t criticise them for it.

Overall: This was my favourite of the stories both for its nostalgic content – a lot of the science fiction I cut my teeth on was written in an age when progress seemed inevitable and the future, apocalyptic or utopian, was atomic – and for its thoroughly enjoyable style, not showy, self-conscious or over-dramatic but clear, playful and readable.

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Helen Ends the World

By Greg Johansson

The hour the world ended, Sean’s knuckles wrapped whitely over mine, pushing my oar violently into the river. Don't break your back Mike. I’d been half-assing all day. I wasn't lazy, just saving my ener-

gy for the evening when, no matter how tired, we’d drag these rafts out of the water while the girls argued up a fire to cook by.

Alise thought up the Columbia and the plan to ride it into the Snake river. We cruised, as lazily as she promised, to its chief tributary. We rode the Clearwater almost to Idaho; the big idea being we follow the path of Lewis and Clark. The girls planned it while Sean and I stood at the bar. Sean kept talking about Iran and I found no way to change the subject. Rebecca floated the idea of hiking, which I should have fought for, but Alise shot it down. They clinked their glasses to seal the bargain and wine spilled on Alise’s

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shirt. “You can’t really see it,” she said. It did blend with the Pepsi logo. Rebecca’s shirt said Bahama Mama over a sailboat silhouetted on a yellow puddle representing the ocean.

It was 1980.

The smoothed rocks of the riverbed kneaded the bottom of the raft. When we got in a twist around some whitewater we’d knock each other and our life vests brushed together, sounding like the straps of Alise’s velcro shoes ripping open. As soon as we cleared the tight spots, Alise and Rebecca would turn back to us just for a smile, just to take credit for this sharp piece of life we were living.

Alise and I met in the Corps during a training program. The Army Corps of Engineers is more like a civilian organization than any other part of the Department of Defense, and we had our own insipid versions of retreats and management programs. In our program, they took us down south and compelled us to work together building a boat, not a raft like the one we were on: a canoe. We had to pick a leader, pay our dues, or drown. When she submitted to the crowd that two person teams work best, I voted Alise for leader: a position she has yet to relinquish. We carried wood logs, each taking an end, working together.

We made our way down river. The first day was enough to tell we'd be sick of each other by the second. Sean pointed out bald eagles: “See the golf balls sitting in the trees?” He pointed out ospreys too until they became eagles again. “No, wait, they are Ospreys.” His identifications shifted more than the river.

There were stretches of quiet, which would feel strange. They were the reason we came out at all.

Occasionally, I'd learn forward and ask Alise is she was ok. I call her baby and she makes a show of being annoyed by it. I know she isn't though. She says she’s fine and the hour gets a little later.

Rebecca saw the ash first. ”Snow,” she said, knowing she guessed wrong as she said it. Everyone looked. She said no, showing she needed no correction as she turned to Sean. He sat on the lip of the boat with his paddle resting in his lap like a dulcimer.

The cloudless sky receded to the east and an upcoming woollen cloudfront came from the west. Before it, dusty plooms threw out like rice at a wedding. I straightened my back as if it would make a difference. The cloudcover stretched beyond assessment. I forgot the whole morning.

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Sean looked around and examined this fresh world. He had the confusion of an awoken sleepwalker. I said something bad is going on. “There must be a fire on the other side of the mountain.”

Sean saw me waiting for his agreement. When Rebecca joined me he gave a rare nod.

Not having anymore information, we continued. The freezing water slipped in my shirt and soaked my jeans until they felt warm, and I thought hypothermia -but does it do that? And what if it does?

“I think it is a fire,” said Rebecca. “Damn Forest Service probably let a controlled burn get out of hand. You should see who they have working there.”

I asked no one in particular if we were moving closer to or away from it.

“It’s following us. It’s coming from behind,” Rebecca said. “I hope we don’t get blamed.”

Alise pointed out deer on the run along the riverbank, making her the only person not watching the sky.

“Some kids set some fire and the ecosystem is ruined for years,” I said. “I wonder how they figure out how these things start.” I told Alise we’d find out when we get back.

We barely padded, letting the river do the work. The ash brought rain. We heard a low rumble we thought meant thunder and we picked up the pace while the river narrowed. Rebecca put her elbow in my face with every stroke. We stayed clear of the rocks. The smell of the air changed.

The worst got worse. Tendrils of black smoke swept across the sky. A lush sheet of darkness comforted us all strangely, assuring us this could not be real. Gunmetal gray ash fell over us, seemed to favor us actually, and we kept our mouths shut for fear that we’d eat it. It smothered and embraced us, and in an hour, we looked like ghosts. Even our cheeks were covered. This new world, painted in two shades, coiled around us.

The early dark encouraged us to pull the boat ashore. We kept our eyes on the sky and trees, now burdened with soot. We each took a corner of the boat, Sean and I were crotch deep, and we dragged it

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high into the treeline up a rooty slope. My shoe fell a foot too quickly into a dent in the dirt and the girls

looked at me in concern. I might have broken a toe.

We nosed around a grassy area for animal shit and, once satisfied it seemed clean enough, unpacked our five bags. The gear knocked about in an insulated box and our sleeping bags were stuffed with two changes of clothes and two days of contraband. Alise had expensive fruit bars she treated like K rations.

Sean and Rebecca kept their beers separate with no plans to share. I brought Rye which managed to open itself and coat my sleeping bag. I ran my hand deep in and confirmed enough spillage to ensure I’d wake up smelling like a cigar.

Alise suggested we bring the boat up and flip it over so we could have some shelter. Sleeping under the stars, our original plan, required the stars be visible. Sean came by me with a beer in his hand, already empty. “Shall we,” he said.

We went down for the boat, I had a hand on it, lifting it as if something could be under it, and I waited for Sean to put the bottle down. He did not. He flirted with horizon, glancing at it sheepishly. “This can't be a fire,” he said. “This ash is moving against the wind.”

Sean wound a rope around his elbow and open palm. “I didn't think they'd actually do it Mike.”

The news had been full of stryfe. We planned to be back in time to see the US try out for the Olympics it had boycotted. There would be no Americans in Moscow because there were hundreds of thousands of Russians in Afghanistan. Everyone but Rebecca worked for the Army Corps, so the conflict found its way into conversation easily. Before we got out there everyone’s position stood well known, all of us scientists except Sean, who being military, ostensibly ran our office. If something were to happen with the USSR, he could be shipped somewhere. This kept our arguments abstract.

I had an end of the boat, Sean looked away from it, seeing it as suddenly pointless. I waited until he resigned himself to it. By the time we reached our camp he could smile.

“Where’s your beer bottle?” Rebecca’s mouth slacked in phoney surprise.

“I dropped it.”

“Bastard.”

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Settled in, we ate, meal first and then drinks after. Sean and I kept drinking. This brought on hunger so we ate even more. The fire struggled against the rain and ash as Rebecca gave Sean angry looks.

Alise kept grabbing ash from the air and rubbing it between her fingers.

We kept feeding the tiny fire until it was all we could see or smell. Rebecca drank and it became clear all the booze, a weekends worth, would be gone tonight. Sean must have said something to her along the lines of what he said to me. It occurred to me that I was responsible for Alise, I owed her some kind of explanation of why the world was ending. There would be no announcement from Sean, who, quiet by nature, had already said more than he wanted. I thought of what to say, Alise must have detected my bewilderment so she poured out the last of the rye into my metal cup. She took a cautionary sip of it. “My flask is empty,” she explained. She asked me if I had more.I didn't. “Figures,” she said.

I didn't have to tell her anything. She knew.

Alise and I drank our rye. Rebecca laughed alone on the other side of the fire, stopping only when

she put her face to Sean’s. Alise tried to say something but she drowned it each time. When her bottle emptied, she said she’d been seeing someone else. It got serious only the one time. “You've been seeing someone too, right?” I told her no. This was the only time I saw her upset.

Alise pushed down my knee and folded her legs over me. Sean must have noticed because he looked past us into the dark He ticked his head to ask me if they should leave us alone. I shook no. People don't really have sex the last thing they do, you don't feel like it. I wondered, now that the society who made shame was gone, if we should all sleep together. When there’s no tomorrow, no one really belongs to anyone anymore.

Sean was gone when we awoke. A silent panic circled before Alise asked Rebecca where. Rebecca struggled with this; it was something she was supposed to know. “He may have got a head start on us. He may be scouting about.”

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We organized no search; each just wandered in a different direction. Midday already passed by with us asleep but it didn't look it. The sky folded itself, gray wool shedding into the tree line. I went up the ridge, thinking I could get a better look.

I had a moment alone. It was reassuring to think that this could all somehow be my fault: the end of the world. I did work for the Defense Department. I had responsibilities. I tortured notions for a way that my negligence could have let our guard down, made this attack easier. It was freezing but I began to sweat. I may have still been a little drunk.

A sound crunched down the ridge. I saw Rebecca, her eyes down to keep sure footing, still careful. I asked her if she had seen Sean. “He’s at the top of the ridge.”

I denied my imagination any leeway. I like to think, as an engineer, that I live by my imagination.

I find solutions to problems both antique and pervasive, invent new problems for others, I bet my life that my mind was stronger than death; that bridges, dams, deep water pipes, wells dug to the center of the earth, water processing units shot into space on the shuttle, would last nearly forever, go nearly everywhere. My conceited imagination, quaint now, fancies me the setter of the bones of civilization. Even in

ruins my projects would awe.

Sean stood at the top the ridge, looking downriver. He leaned forward and looked down and I rushed quietly behind him. When he heard me, he leaned back.

“Not high enough,” he said.

I looked down. There were some promising rocks wearing sheets of rapids. But Sean was right, we were not high enough. Automatically, I tried to solve the problem. Even with a running jump the velocity would not generate enough force to break our bones. You can’t just hope for the skull or neck, which made me think with the resources we have available...and I supposed, with a stone, Sean and I could do the girls. Then he could do me. But then he would drop the rock and walk right back up here, and the thought of him standing here alone until the end of the world struck me as so unjust. I could offer to be the last one to go but everyone save Alise would think I just wanted go last. I would lose their trust; that somehow mattered. I could not ask.

“Let’s keep going down river,” I gurgled. “See if we find anyone.”

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We got the boat back in the water and sat on our life vests. Where was my technical mind? This

wind, picking up, was probably the same as two days ago. No blast, no war, no storm could change the wind. It was the wind that made storms, and you can't change that. Sean crouched on the rubber bow and I lounged at the back. His shoulders twisted oddly and pulled at his shirt in a way that made it seem the mechanics of them were broken. The girls were laid out in between. No one rowed. I allowed myself to steer as I wanted and it caused no problems as the river was calm. The water was the color of coffee with cream, and the shiver the surface had yesterday had been eased.

“I wonder what rivers in Russia look like,” Alise said. She examined the water with something akin

to pity.

“Frozen,” Rebecca said, still drunk. “Dried out now, I’ll bet.”

What she said made no sense but no one disagreed. An expectation loomed that somehow we were going to run out of river when the horizon arrived. A final and terrible fate awaited us as representatives of the betrayal our kind had perpetrated on everything we saw. Tree branches ahead shook on each riverbank

like they were pulling back a curtain; ash flew off them only to be replaced.

We were powerless. No chance to stop it, no heroism or opportunity to indulge in promising paternal instincts to throw myself between danger and innocence. Only the choice to think of myself as the innocent, or to cop by action or inaction being responsible for no more. No more snack cakes, s'mores or men on the moon. I tried to find some poetry to give everything meaning so I could at least be the person in the group who had something to say. But the only words my brain could gather was the big list of things that didn't exist anymore or what we’d never do. That was the wrong way to think about it Rebecca rose, showing an interest she lacked since first seeing “snow” yesterday, and we had to look upriver to see what she saw. It was certainly a building, very close to the water, high on safe ground.

A powerline followed up from one its corners and ran off into the woods, and the kept roof was solid brown like a doll’s house, too small to be a home. No one speculated aloud what it could be.

19

Sean jumped out as soon as we were lined up with it. He stood before the bow and planted his feet in the riverbed and held us there fast. In the large shutterless window we saw a man. Sean shouted, and the man looked up. I put a hand on Alise as the man put on a ranger hat and opened his door.

“Hey yourself.”

“Where did they hit us?”

The ranger said nothing. He assessed Sean and the boat.

“Seattle? Did they hit Seattle?”

The ranger responded like he didn’t hear the question. “Mount St. Helen’s,” he sang out. “It erupted.” He made a twirling motion with his hand and nodded with a satisfaction I remember as being complete.

Sean shared with us a staggered exhale. He asked the ranger: “Do you have any beer?”

The ranger dismissed him with a wave and Sean climbed back on the boat. Rebecca cradled him.

The mountains, created by volcanic rage underneath the surface, laughed around us. They had the cruelty of things wounded. The magma pointed and the mountains reached for the sky; everything we saw was made by rage.

We drifted unbridled down the river, now sure of our destination. We’d ate ourselves sick and drank ourselves dry so there was no reason to stop. We slept in the boat a final night. The clouds smoked.

Sometimes there were stars.

Alise talked about the things she wanted to before we saw the ash: the state of the kitchen, new res-

taurants. My fear of losing her, which subsided for one night, returned.

Her conversation searched for a world where we had a future.

20

Feedback on “Helen Ends the World”

Liam Hogan: A cleverly worked story, like a few others it harks back to the idea of an apocalypse rather than actually ending the world, and in the canoeists ready willingness to accept the worst, the dynamics are set. I'd be tempted to not mention the year (1980) to save the surprise for later, and I'd like to see a deeper emotional response from the four - more time spent in their heads, a little less in the Army Corps perhaps. Doing this, might also help to give each of them their own, distinctive voices. For a full power punch, the group could do - or at least be a lot closer to doing - something they wouldn't have done if they'd know it wasn't the end of the world...

Gillian McGrandles: Not sure why it had to be set in 1980 – there is still a nuclear threat now. I was unsure of the gender of the protagonist until towards the end so felt unconnected as I couldn’t build up a picture of him whilst reading. I hated the author’s use and style of excessive description: ‘A lush sheet of darkness’ ‘Gunmetal gray ash’ - yuk! The story’s strength was the characters’ uncertainty and speculation about the source of the ash and the ensuing journey down the river. I would have enjoyed the whole story taking place during the boat journey and getting a feel of the characters’ fears more – less ‘volcanic rage’.

Lucy Blackburn: 1. Original idea and author takes advantage of this to explore the fragility of "the norm".

2. The characterisation was weak. Got no real sense of who the characters are or why they're on the trip.

Overall: the author was attempting something quite ambitious here but unfortunately they didn't quite pull it off. Either needed to be a bit smarter with getting the reader to engage with the characters or take the breakdown of the norm to an extreme. As it is, there's a hole at the heart of this story.

Jason Pursey: Helen Ends the World reads like the most complete story in the list. There is a clear establishment of characters, a hypothesis of their situation and a solid conclusion. Ultimately it's the interpersonal relationships that ground this piece: I was far more concerned Mike and Alise's uncertain relationship than the apparent destruction of their society. This is brought full-circle at the end of the story, where the characters are left back in the world they seem so desperate to leave. There are parallels to other stories of adolescent dissociation, but here it feels genuine despite the limited time we have with the characters.

The other couple – Sean and Rebecca – seem almost superfluous in contrast. The characters also seem too quick to give in to their worst fears, the height of which is Sean and Mike contemplating a suicidal plunge just hours after deciding their party are the sole survivors. Given the pseudo-military background of most of the characters this felt too defeatist: one of the general tropes of survivor fiction is seeing how people band together and overcome the hardships, so seeing this pair so willing to give up so quickly was deflating. Perhaps with more length this progression could be presented in a more controlled way, so we are given time to be persuaded of their conclusion.

21

Will Robertson: I liked The isolated, almost claustrophobic setting was perfect for this story, as was the bleak tone. The behaviour of the main characters, and the obvious strains in their relationships, were interesting – as was the story’s central concept.

I didn’t like I wasn’t completely convinced by how ready the main characters were to accept that the world had ended – from trying to outrun a forest fire to contemplating suicide in the space of a few hours.

Overall While I’m not sure the characters’ quick resignation convinced me, I enjoyed the interactions between them, as well as the hopelessly bleak tone with which the story was narrated. I thought the way the story played on Cold War fears of destruction was interesting, as was the way that the main character was forced from almost self-indulgent ideas of his own importance to an acceptance of his insignificance.

22

THE LITTLE WAYS YOU COULD TELL THE WORLD WAS ENDING

By Gabriel Wainio-Théberge

Well, there were more disasters. But everybody knows that.

Actually, what I just said was more complex, and more accurate, than I gave it credit for. Yes, there were more natural disasters, and yes, everybody knows that. But what doesn’t get mentioned is how everything somehow became a disaster.

Like the weather. I mean the hurricane was a real disaster, but what about Christmas? That Christmas that wasn’t white. (I think that same year, Easter wasn’t green. But no-one cares about green Easters the way they care about white Christmases, even when the world is ending.)

The newsmen that year were like children, with tears in their eyes. That might have been good marketing at Christmas, when everyone is supposed to return to childlike innocence. But damn! When we talked about it we weren’t talking about weather, we were talking about a disaster. Or maybe something smaller. An omen – Latin, monstrum. Monster weather.

The remnants of a hurricane are sweeping across Southern Ontario, bringing torrential rains and bad road conditions.

And we were going out to see that parade. Which parade? Some stupid shit, not like one of those parades in New York that people actually go to. I could say it rained on your parade. I tried to joke about that but then you started crying. Or were you crying before I made the joke? Before. You started crying while we kissed in the phone booth. I think I was supposed to have been calling one of your friends to pick you up. Well, you forgot about that, I forgot but you didn’t remind me.

23 Any other year you would have laughed. There were more disasters. We stayed in the phone booth until the rain stopped. Some guy gave us the middle finger for hogging the phone.

A number of sentences ago, I mentioned New York. Just mentioned it in passing, didn’t even talk about it. How did that happen?

New York, of course, was the first city to go. Tokyo was next.

The people in Tokyo were all pissed off that New York went first. It was sort of a thing.

The cities used to have a special light at night. Not the light at their centres, but the light for miles around them, not their deliberate light but the light they made by accident, that filled the sky where there were no lights. Only at night. Night in the city was this light, the night was a dim and diffusive mirror on the cities, spreading dark light. When the cities were alight the night in the fields and the city lawns was indigo. It was not bright. It was dark but not dark like the light you know, not black like the black you know. It was a blue sky soaked in black, bleached in black, bleeding blue. A bruisy colour, a blueberry colour, but never squishy, never encroaching, ever distant, ever clear, starless, smoky, passing. In places and times, gold haloed the hills, the gold of city lights hung near the ground like firefly souls. It was a light you could sleep through, a sleeping light. It slept stretched out frokm the crack of dusk to the break of dawn.

You can still see it, but not at night. Not at twilight, but between the twilight and the night. The afterglow of sunset mimics the glow of the distant cities which still stand on the horizons, indistinguishable from trees. The ghosts of the cities are lit by the ghost of the sun. Like the embers of a dead fire. The sky is its smoke.

No-one really thought about how time was speeding up. Everyone assumed it was just their perception of time, and nobody bothered about that either. If everyone felt it, then it had to be normal. If it was normal, then it had to be good. At the very least, the end of the world wasn’t normal.

Regarding time it’s pretty obvious how it all went. Every day was shorter than the last. Each month, each year. They say it only felt that way but there was less time to do things in the day, things disappeared from our schedules without any additions. When you worked, sometimes something would happen and you’d stop for a second. Afterwards you’d remember nothing of that second. This happened often, and was hard to notice, because unless someone else caught you, it technically could not be noticed. Myself, I would go to sleep. The shortest I ever slept was a fifth of a second, and I would have assumed I had blinked if I hadn’t remembered a second-long dream. The longest of these incidents was fifteen minutes – I passed out in

24 a movie theater. The only thing I remember is the bass, which sounded like voices. This was around the time companies started reporting a decrease in productivity.

It wasn’t us, it was time, or else how would time have collapsed to that singularity which was the end of the world?

After days became hours, after those hours became a minute, after that one shitty year that was a second, time had to speed up to the point at which you couldn’t recognize it as time any more. An eternity we couldn’t remember, might have slept through.

Of course time began again, and when it did the slowness became unbearable. Even the slightest motion forced one to experience the endless movement of atom after atom through point after point of space. The world we had known was gone when we opened our eyes. Something had happened, but it happened too fast to make sense of in these dragging days.

The wild animals had been gone for a while, but as long as they weren’t all dead it didn’t matter that they were gone.

When forest fires streaked the hills, some attentive people said it might have been the wild animals, burning their homes behind them as they moved on. There were stories of solemn gatherings of ravens with torches in their beaks, on deep whirlpools of autumn nights.

Then the cats went. Missing cat posters went up first in twos then in dozens and instead of the old ones, new cats showed up around the neighbourhood. They must have been passing through but they never gave that impression. They sat around on lawns a lot, and if you passed them on the street they would turn into someone’s driveway and curl up on the porch. They had collars but nobody had ever seen them, and as much as they acted at home, soon nobody saw them again. If they were migrating the only evidence of their direction was this news story, a fluff piece, about this Argentinian lady whose cat was discovered pacing back and forth at the end of the southernmost dock on Tierra Del Fuego, a look of utter despair in its eyes.

Dogs never did this. They stuck to their owners’ sides as if they didn’t understand the concept of leaving. They often dove into the bushes barking as they did when they saw a cat, sniffing around for cats that were never there. They didn’t bother with the new cats. Farm dogs howled, hoping for the wild dogs, the coyotes and wolves, to reply. When the world ended, men died digging tombs for dead dogs. The dogs didn’t go like the people: all at once, in one missed moment, the dogs died on their feet, standing tall and strong and dignified for the first time in months, even the dachshunds.

Every day the time allotted to the city-light shrinks a bit. In the stretched evenings of summer, the city-light used to stretch like a cat over the light night and the roughshod fields. You can see the dark and the fields by city-light, and only the forests are black, a ragged evening-gown on the shoulders of the fields. Then the winter came and the winter night was a

25 knockout. The cold would snap your toes like firewood, the night would punch your lights out. So you get into the shack when the sun starts to set, forget about evenings. The empty cities became statues, and when the spring came, the dusk didn’t recover.

Some winter, the city-light will be less than a fragment of nothing, a figment of the past. Will we be able to perceive it, to differentiate it from the light and the dark, the dark light and the dim? Will the dim disappear? Will philosophers debate city -light? Will they philosophize that it never existed, that its existence was metaphorical? Or that it exists, but that by its very nature it cannot be proven by human faculties or defined as a few minutes of time? Will they debate its attributes? Will they attribute its decline to the end of the echo of the cities, to nature finally forgetting their light and their beauty? Will the scientifically minded seek to set it apart from the dusk? Will it be the subject of faith? Will there still be philosophers?

It rained on the last night, and the newscasters screamed and beat their fists against the TV cameras, how unfair it was that it wouldn’t snow.

To think the snow, ten days before Christmas, had given us all hope. Except the homeless refugees from the disasters – they were bitter and tried to get in the way of the Christmas shoppers, falling apart piece by piece from frostbite so they looked like lepers. On the last day these half-men (sometimes literally) got together and drank the rain as it fell. The whole world drank, and lurched between the hours from its drunkenness.

Standing in the same bus stop, in the same rain, in the same humbling storm of people as when we kissed and cried, when you left me. Or was it the day after, after a day that felt like a second? Days of loss are supposed to be the longest but I remember you leaving me in the sunshine, when your features were crisp and the crowd dispersed like particles in a gas. In those days it had become possible to sleep through meals. Sleepwalkers ate one meal a day. They let the food slide down their gullets – in context there was no more appropriate word – gulp after gulp until they were so full the crumbs and strands flopped out against their lips.

Standing in the same bus stop, in the same humbling storm of people, in the same rain as when we kissed and cried, what a ridiculous plot device. Who writes this shit? There I go talking about life as if it were a movie. On the TV screens in the shop windows, fast-moving close-ups of carnage came in from cell phone cameras in New York and Tokyo, but everyone had seen it a thousand times before. The giant screens in the square played rom-com previews.

I remember when you left the apartment. The TV blew up in the middle of the night again. “We can’t stay here,” you insisted, “when an earthquake hits we’ll be killed under the ceiling and the beams…”

26 A song buzzed from the phone in my pocket: It was a long and dark December, From the rooftops I remember There was snow, white snow…

The rain was white as milk, cold as dry ice.

I remember when I found you pacing back and forth outside the phone booth in the snow, happy to be alone. “It’s not safe out here,” I cried, trying to get you to come back inside. “Yes, but out here I have nothing,” you said, “so nothing’s going to end.” “You’ll always have me,” I said, and you said “no.”

On the last night, the city, the screen, began to fade out, and I watched for the credits to roll.

I’ve described you and how everything was a disaster with you, I’ve made you sound paranoid and desperate and dead.

But was I the same? I can’t remember. I remember how you thought of things as disasters, but I can’t remember how I thought of things at all, I don’t think I even thought of it. I just remember disasters. Was I the same? Please tell me, you’re the only one who can say.

27

Feedback on “The Little Ways You Could Tell the World was Ending” Liam Hogan: What I would term an experimental piece, and there is much to admire here in the ideas and great turns of phrase. But in the end, it is a little too discordant, a little too oblique. You might consider a stronger dynamic between the he and the she - even a conflict, if she is the one who sees a disaster in all the little things, while he - and most others - ignore these signs. Telling it that way, you would not linger so much on those signs - because the narrator did not see them as signs - which would make the piece cleaner and stronger. A "chicken little" for the modern times... Finally, use expletives, even minor ones like "shit", judiciously, use their power, rather than just throwing them in, and they are less likely to throw someone out of a story, more like to drag them in.

Gillian McGrandles: Great opening line. Actually bang on theme which is refreshing in this shortlist. Beautifully written – I loved the language used: ‘But no-one cares about green Easters the way they care about white Christmases, even when the world is ending.’ ‘The people in Tokyo were all pissed off that New York went first. It was sort of a thing’ – fantastic. Even the descriptive passage about the cities’ artificial light is well written. I like the use of italics for this deviation in style from the rest of the story – good use of typeface! The plot about time speeding up that comes in nearly halfway through is great and not explained but written from the point of view of the common folk who weren’t getting it explained to them. Cats migrating but not dogs – genius bit. The ending brings it round to being a stream of consciousness and paranoia with trust in only one other person as trust in the world in general is gone. Gorgeous.

Lucy Blackburn: 1. Some really beautiful description of the city lights.

2. The love story - it just didn't add anything.

Overall: there were some very strong moments in this story but it didn't hang together. The "tiny noticeable things" were clumsily chosen and this, coupled with a lack of explanation, made it quite hard to get through.

28

Jason Pursey: Little Ways has the feel of a great, impactful story squeezed into too small a space. There are glimpses of brilliant ideas but the result is a piece that feels torn between too many concepts leave the reader with a solid idea of what has been covered.

The presence of several overused narrative faux-pas – the opening paragraph is a prime example, stating that the reader should be taking for granted a brand new concept – detract heavily from the quality of the writing.

There is a conflicted sense of what is actually occurring in the story throughout. At first, it's given that the world is ending, but this is quickly scaled back to a frost-free yuletide. Later, we're presented with the concept of time of out step, the abandonment of cities and, perhaps most surreally, a feline mutiny a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Added to this is the underlying metaphor of the breakup of the rarely glimpsed couple. In all, this is overwhelming and it's difficult to piece together an overall narrative.

The great strength to this story is its concepts. The description of the empty cities as statues is stirring, and the time slips open the realms of all kinds of surrealist ideas. This is a story that needs space to pace it out and give the reader time to embrace its concepts. * I'd like to give a special credit here - despite its problems Little Ways stood out from the competition as being adventurous in its storytelling. Its technical faults brought down its placing, but with some editing this could have easily made my top three.

Will Robertson: I liked This story certainly isn’t short of ideas, nor of imagery – my personal favourite being the lost cat. I like the almost distracted first-person style, in which the reader is told merely what it occurs to the narrator to mention, leaving them attempting to piece together a story of wider events from the fragments they overhear.

I didn’t like For me, the italicised parts of the story, which abandon the direct, personal style for grander musings on the nature of city light, didn’t work as well. They don’t appear part of the story the narrator is trying to tell, but if they are told from a different perspective or at a different time I didn’t think this was made clear.

In addition some of the concepts – while interesting – probably needed more space to do them justice, particularly the concept of time speeding up.

Overall This was the only “literally” apocalyptic story (I think) in the shortlist, and what a range of ominous events it contains – from time dilation to pet extinctions. In fact, while rich in both language and concepts, I feel that the sheer number of ideas packed in here is actually the story’s weakness.

The writer’s gift for imagery and the strong potential of the fractured, stream-of-consciousness narrative could be strengthened by either a longer form or focussing on one or two key ideas, either of which would give the themes – which are certainly interesting – more space to develop.

29

Sunday Afternoon Drive

By Melissa Kuipers The father says it is time for a Sunday afternoon drive. The mother thinks this is a strange idea, at two o’clock in November. There isn’t any colour in the town, not even the sparkle of snow. Just empty trees and brown flowerbeds and grey drifts of slush in the ditches. The father thinks they might as well take the dog, and if they take the dog they might as well take the bird.

The mother is surprised since he’s seemed indifferent to the bird since she bought it, but she has seen little of him lately, and doesn’t think it wise to nag. He knows what he wants when he wants it.

She stands in her pantyhose on a chair to lift the

birdcage from the ceiling. She steps off, careful not to tear her pencil skirt, and holds the cage with both hands. The boys and the girl are buttoning their coats over their Sunday best, the boys in blue suspenders and white shirts graying at the collar. She thinks anyone who notices the stains will write them off as shadows. The bottoms of the girl’s pigtails bounce against her red coat collar. Each pigtail is split into two curls, light brown as the mother’s hair was when she was young, but fine like her husband’s. She wonders if his hair was curly as a child, but as they are in a rush to leave, and as he likes his quiet on a Sunday, she thinks it best not to ask him, and feels the question will float away. No one will ever know the answer. The oldest boy is growing to look increasingly like his father. See, she says in her mind as the bird’s tiny beak pecks against her fingers. He has your broad forehead, your strong shoulders, your warm eyes. How could you ever wonder?

They move into the car, the Jaguar, which she should be proud of even if it is falling apart. It was a purchase she knew they could barely afford but as he is the breadwinner she knows not to question his decisions. “So I bought a Jaguar,” he said to everyone he ran into that first week—the mailman, the milkman, the neighbour mowing the grass. “Well, look at that,” they said. It didn’t have any rust spots on it then, but she knew as soon as she saw it that it wouldn’t run properly. The heater refuses to work properly and it never starts with the first turn of the ignition.

30 The girl sits between her parents, the boys in the back with the dog between them, the bird in its cage in the trunk chirping anxiously. He won’t be able to stand that noise, she thinks, and will take the bird back inside. But he simply turns the key in the ignition, four times, without cursing.

“Careful Lappy doesn’t get his paws on your nice clean pants,” she says airily to the boys, her head turned half towards them. What she means by “nice clean pants” is “your only dress pants and we won’t be able to afford to get you new ones till these are bursting at the seams so don’t let that dog put his claws into them or everyone will think badly of me.” It’s a shame that the boys are so close in age and that the second is nearly the same size as the first so there is little time to make use of handme-downs.

As they drive in silence she tries to remember what she and her husband must have talked about in England, when they first met. Or rather, what it was he talked about because she seldom had much to say. He loved the way she turned her head away so slightly with a soft smile when he stared into her eyes uncomfortably long. He thought it was flirting, and she didn’t bother to tell him it wasn’t, that she couldn’t stand to maintain eye-contact. She finally had something to look forward to when she started courting the dispatch rider. It made him more peaceful, she felt, that he had been trained to fight but didn’t.

Her stories were never as exciting as his, seeing as her parents were both dead and she had lived in England most of her life and here he was, a soldier from Canada, his fresh accent and rugged R’s and his ability to hold a conversation with unwavering eye-contact. He had done most of the talking on their dates but he did like some of her stories. She started the stories sparsely, casually dropping a detail here and there in conversation and then waited for some sort of response. He would coax her on and she would learn to find the aspects worth repeating.

Her silk worms he didn’t seem to care about so much, about the mulberry trees her uncle had planted in the backyard just for her. She had tried, in fact, to show Warren the worms once when he came to visit, so he could see for himself how quickly they could eat the leaves, but he walked into the doorway of the barn, said he couldn’t handle the smell and turned around and left. He hadn’t been interested last month when Arthur had sent her the letter from the Lullingstone Farm where she donated her silkworms when she immigrated: “We want to thank you again for the worms you donated years ago. We thought you might be interested to know that your worms produced silk used in the Queen’s coronation gown. We wish to send a portion of the fabric, as a thank you for your invaluable contribution to our farm.” She had read the letter again and again, ran the fabric between her fingers.

He couldn’t be bothered with the silkworms now or then. But other stories went off better. About her first few years in India where her father had his jute factory and how she had not spoken English until she was four because the servants, who spent more time with her than her parents did, were not allowed to learn it. He thought she was exotic for speaking only Hindi, and wanted to hear her speak it to him, but she couldn’t remember a word. About the Jack Russell terrier that pined to death when she left, though her mother didn’t tell her till years later. Every time she would ask about the little white terrier, her mother would say, “He misses you, but he is happy, now that it’s summer and he can play outside all the time,” or “now that it’s cooler out, and he can play outside all the time,” or “now that it’s raining and he can play in the mud all the time. Your ayah has so much work bathing him every day!” But four years later, after her father’s letters petered out, Alice’s mother told her the truth.

The dog had stopped eating the day their ship left and died within two weeks. Alice’s father mentioned it in a letter but begged his wife to protect Alice from the information until he could bring her a new dog, when he came back. The Canadian soldier

31 always loved this story, the terrier who couldn’t live without her, her estranged parents knitting stories to protect her from the pain of truth.

Her brother determined recently that her father had been eaten by cannibals. “Sit down,” he said when he called. He told her slowly that he had paid someone more money than she cared to know to track their father down. She didn’t know why he needed to know, why he wanted to invest so much money to find someone who was so little a part of them. Arthur told her their father eventually got involved in diamonds, through the husband of the woman he had been sleeping with in India. He had made an expedition with a group to an area widely inhabited by a headhunting tribe. The other men on the trip said he wandered away from the group without a translator, and the most likely explanation they could find was that he had been captured.

“By the head-hunters?” she asked, as if a statement. Arthur paused, as if trying to read her tone.

“Yes.” She began to laugh, softly, deeply, and as he joined her they both began to laugh harder and harder, to the point of tears.

“I am glad you told me to sit!” she said between gasps.

It was a precious moment, the two of them laughing to tears about the picture in their minds of the dark head-hunters cleaning their father’s femur of soft white meat, using his bones as piercings in their faces.

“I just,” her brother said between laughing gasps, “I just had to know what had come of the old bastard. I gathered he was dead anyway.”

“I did too.”

“It seemed the right way for him to go—without a trace.”

She wasn’t sure why she had said she thought he was dead. She could no longer remember what she had thought of her father before this conversation. Dead seemed just as likely as still alive and screwing a new woman. Wandering Africa seemed just as likely as still in India or back in England, perhaps living mere miles away from their cottage, with a new business endeavor. Her father could be anywhere and everywhere and nowhere.

About the other woman, they had all known years before her mother died. He had sent letters for two years explaining he would come soon, sent jewellery. Alice remembered only one piece, a gold snake with one glaring ruby eye, which twisted around her mother’s wrist in several spirals. She didn’t like to look at her mother while she wore it, couldn’t stand for her mother to tuck her in with it on, the winding golden scales flashing around above her as her mother’s hand bunched the blankets around her shoulders. Alice would close her eyes, turn her head from her mother and say she didn’t want to see that horrid snake thing. Her mother wore it for a week, and then gave up and never wore it again. When Alice turned sixteen, a month after her mother died, she found it in a velvet bag in a wooden box in her mother’s closet. It was the only piece she found; the others had likely been pawned off at various points of need after his money stopped trickling in. It wasn’t the kind of thing British girls wore at that time, but it fit surreptitiously under her blouse sleeve, and in the right lighting she could catch a glimpse through the cotton of the fiery eye staring at her.

Her husband drives the jaguar past the graveyard on the outskirts of town, the graveyard where her son is buried. Little Ricky, two months old. This was the graveyard she would be buried in, beside her husband, whoever went first. It would likely be she, as death was always falling around her, but then she had missed it so often perhaps she would continue to do so.

They pass the United Church, where they have been attending regularly for a year now. She isn’t sure she likes going to

32 church every Sunday any more. She had at first, when it was connected to her husband’s sobriety—the cause or effect, she was never sure which. He would come home happy, as if the good words of the sermon really had taken root in his heart. He was kinder at home, and home more often instead of spending most of his time at the grocery store trying to make ends meet. He even served as deacon for a term at the church. It seemed that finally he was true to life he had promised. The children came back from Sunday school with colouring pages to be hung on the fridge and good morals to make them turn into good people one day. But since they had lost baby Ricky and sold the grocery store he had started drinking again. She wonders what kept them still going to church now that her husband had something to feel bad about while sitting in the pew staring at the pink Jesus face in the stained glass window.

There was a time, before she met her husband, when she was eighteen, when her town was bombed. She was in her bedroom at her aunt and uncle’s house where she lived after her mother died. The sirens started, late, and she could see the planes through the gauzy sheers over window and felt the house shake, heard the explosions and the screams of people in the streets.

She froze and knew that death was falling around her and there was nothing to be done. She could not move until she heard her uncle yell, “Get under the table!” and then she could not disobey.

“Alice, quickly! Come under the table!” She ran from

her room to see her two cousins and her aunt and uncle all crowded under the mahogany dinner table, thick and heavy and she thought about how it would be the best way, to be crushed evenly under its weight, better than sitting on the bed and waiting for shrapnel or ceiling beams to rip into her body.

“Alice! Hide under the table!” one cousin yelled as if it were a game. What are we hiding from, she wondered as she lifted her skirt to her knees and crept under where the rest were huddled. Hiding from the Germans who are currently bombing us? From the bombs? From death? The house quacked and collapsed around them and she put her hands over her ears to block out her cousins’ screams and her aunt’s horrible whimpering against her shoulder.

It took two minutes for the house to finish collapsing, the table jarring and shaking with each falling section of wall. “Oh my Lord! Good God!” Uncle James yelled when it was done. It was three hours of her aunt wailing that they had lost everything, the children trying to wedge their bodies out through the rubble and their father pulling them back. Alice leaned against a leg, closed her eyes, pulled her shirt over her nose and mouth to avoid breathing in dust heavy and coating her family’s hair until they saw the light coming closer, and the men’s voices nearer. “Hello! Hello! Are you alright?”

“Yes, yes! We’re alive! We’re alive!” her aunt cried in gratitude.

“Thank God! Everyone thought you were dead! We swore you were dead!” the men yelled back. The men fought against the rubble until a big man reached down to Alice, and even though she could have climbed out herself, she let him lift her out as the hero he longed to be, this man too old to fight but suddenly a saviour. With tears in his eyes he carried her through the broken sheets of drywall and brick. Her brother would survive, she knew then. If she could make it here in England, he would come back from Burma, perhaps different, but alive.

Her husband had liked this story when she told it, in hushed tones in her living room, so as to keep her aunt and uncle from hearing it as recalling the memory might hurt them. But his eyes lit up when she told him. He took her hand in his, held it gently, as if her life had just become more valuable to him because she had been wedged under mahogany while a house fell around her. “This is a story you’ll tell our children one day,” he said to her.

Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if they had been courting when the house collapsed. Would he

33 have run to dig her out? Would he have thought in those few hours when they were presumed dead of who he would move onto, thought through the other young women in the town? Would he hold to hope until he pulled her out, not “we thought you were dead,” but rather “I knew you were alive”? I knew you would survive. Would she love him even more than she had at their wedding if he had been the man to carry her out? Would he be anymore her saviour in that moment than he was in taking her to Canada and giving her a new home and new life and a family?

They return from their drive an hour later. “Oh my God—oh my God!” says the husband as they turn the corner to their street and smoke fills the sky above the houses. The children begin to wail. She knows which house it is because things are always falling around her. Gone is her wedding veil, her letters from her brother stationed in Burma during the war, her square of silk from the Queen’s coronation gown. She pictures now the strands of silk growing red in the fire, a bright weave of glowing orange for a few seconds and then blown to black dust. The snake bracelet however, she believes, will miraculously survive.

“Our home, Alice! Our home!” he yells before he pulls the car up against the sidewalk beside the neighbour’s house. He leaves the rusting Jaguar running and the door open as he runs to the police. The dog jumps over the seat and runs in barking loops around the people standing in front of the fire. She watches him while she holds the girl in her lap and lets the children cry, knowing none of it makes sense and she can’t remember why he told her to take the bird but knows she can no longer think about what happened before they left. He must have just known that too many things die without our intervention.

34

Feedback on “Sunday Afternoon Drive” Liam Hogan: A very localised apocalypse! Well written, this has a strong voice, and a quirky one as well, of someone who keeps surviving disasters. And yet, it could have perhaps used this to better effect; even though she might become immune to some of the shock disaster brings, this is still the loss of "everything" and yet her reaction is a little too distanced. (Something that could also be levelled at the relationship between husband and wife?) Also, though it seems obvious the husband sets the fire, I think you could still foreshadow his motives in some way - a disaster prone wife, perhaps she muses that she always makes sure she is well insured?

Lucy Blackburn: 1. Alice is very well written. She's a highly complex and conflicting individual.

2. The ending jarred. It felt over-written and it wasn't clear what the author intended.

Overall: the author achieves a lot in a short space of time with Alice's character but I think the story could've been much darker. Alice is set up as a "cursed woman" but in the end it's her husband who tears everything down and she seems entirely disconnected from events.

Jason Pursey: An odd detachment from the characters pervades this story. Although told from a third-person perspective following Alice, the wife, I felt that I was watching shadows against a curtain rather than the characters themselves. This works to translate the feeling of alienation present between the characters. It feels that none of the characters connect between each other, and this is then imbued upon the reader through the awkwardness of their interactions, such as her husband's boasting about his car.

Unfortunately some parts feel forced into the story to justify the overall narrative. I didn't buy into the bombing scene towards the end as the contrast to Alice's smaller misfortunes felt out of proportion. The detail of her father's disappearance also seemed strange, since this had little impact on the protagonist. Finally, after these larger-than-life events, the ending of the burnt-out house felt underwhelming, and I was left expecting something more catastrophic.

Will Robertson: I liked I really enjoyed reading this story. I felt that the structure – nesting a dramatic autobiography within an apparently mundane event – was effective, and I felt that there was a real depth to the central character and the experiences being described.

I liked the wry, knowing observation. From a would-be saviour to the father’s unfortunate but unlamented fate, characters and events are described with a pleasantly unsentimental dryness, and I think this calm narration is needed to hold the story together as it throws out surprise after surprise – some comical, all poignant.

I disliked

35 At first I found the style a little rigid and overly formal. After re-reading the story, though, I think that this is actually beneficial, as an almost unbelievable sequence of excitements and disasters is made more credible by the rather cynical, matter-of-fact tone.

Overall I was impressed by the sheer range of experiences this story managed to cover without feeling rushed or disjointed, and I liked the suggestion that the character was somehow cursed – with even the suggestion of a cursed artefact, whether imagined by the narrator or not.

But what really impressed me was the sensation of depth, that this was a real person describing real events, however improbable some of them seemed – an impression certainly helped by the consistent tone and elegant, uncluttered prose.

36

Ice

By Lori Hahnel

“Hang on, boy. I’m almost ready.”

Deb Turner checked her jacket pockets for keys, phone, iPod, dog bags. The letter to drop in the mailbox. Valentino had his leash on, waited by the door. Lots of snow had fallen overnight and she pulled on her heavy boots, thought for a moment about taking the ice grips Sarah had sent her for Christmas off the hiking boots she’d worn yesterday and putting them on now. But yesterday the metal claws had dragged and grated on the bare concrete, and there really hadn’t been that much ice to watch out for. Old Valentino had already waited a long time. Besides, she wanted to get to the mailbox before nine, mail pick up time.

The neighbourhood got quiet by this time of morning -- kids now in school, rush hour drivers long at work. Sarah and Jenny used to have to get up so early when they were in elementary school, she recalled as she locked the front door. In those days she’d have the dog walked by nine most days. Deb enjoyed being able to sleep a little later now that the kids were both away at university. And Mark no longer banged around in the kitchen every morning, or left his salt-and pepper whiskers all over the sink. Morning was generally a pretty pleasant time these days.

She and Valentino had only walked about a block when, crossing a back alley, they hit a patch of ice under the snow.

One foot slipped, then the other and for a split second she almost righted herself, almost recovered. But the back of her head hit the ice under the snow with a crack.

She opened her squeezed-shut eyes, watched snowflakes drift down in lazy circles for a few moments. The horizon tilted and swooped as she slowly pulled herself up and checked the snow behind her for blood before she put a gloved hand up to her head. “Fuck,” she said, breathing out. It didn’t seem to be bleeding. Valentino, despite being a collie cross, had little in common with Lassie. He did not whimper with concern, had not tried to help her up, hadn’t tried to go for help or anything like that. He just looked at her with his default expression of vague expectation.

“I should have quit you,” Howling Wolf growled, “a long time ago…” She yanked the iPod’s earbuds out and stuffed them into her pocket. Her head throbbed, she felt woozy – not exactly dizzy or nauseated, but not right. Shaken. She peered at the mailbox across the street. They’d at least go that far and see how it went.

37 Tiny, slow baby steps across the polished ice on the road were the only possibility. She dropped the letter into the mailbox and decided to turn back. The trip back to the house took at least twice as long as it should have, but she didn’t want to take any chances. Still her head did not seem to be bleeding, and that had to be a good sign.

Inside she pulled off her boots, wiped the snow from between Valentino’s toes and gave him a cookie. Bending over seemed to make the back of her head feel tight. She got a drink of water, went to the bathroom. The whole back of her head felt swollen, pulpy, tender, but she saw no blood anywhere in her blond hair. Her pupils looked okay – weren’t you supposed to watch a person’s pupils after a head injury? She sat down at the computer to look up concussion symptoms, see if she needed to go to emergency.

Change in pupil size; fluid draining from mouth, nose or ears; irritability; extreme lethargy; stiff neck or vomiting. She went down the list. No, no, no. The headache seemed worse, not surprisingly. She took some acetaminophen and spent a few minutes checking her e-mail. Then she thought she’d lie down for a while. At first she decided to lie on the made-up bed, but then got up, closed the bedroom curtains, changed out of her clothes and back into the grey silk nightgown from the night before, the one Joseph had given her, and got into bed. After all, she really had nothing on until her class in the evening. Might as well have a real sleep and get over this headache, she thought. Valentino jumped up and nestled in beside her.

As she drifted off she remembered a night that seemed so long ago now, when she and Joseph had watched Modern Times on the couch together, his waves of dark brown hair resting on her shoulder. A tear slid down her cheek when Chaplin and Paulette Goddard walked off arm in arm into the Hollywood Hills as “Smile” played. Later she’d melted into his wiry arms, wearing this same nightgown that felt like a dream, that felt like his hands caressing her. ******* Joseph Morrison parked his black Subaru in front of Deb’s house. It always felt funny returning to a place you hadn’t been to in a long time. Especially if you used to spend a lot of time there. Things looked familiar and strange at the same time.

He turned off the ignition and sat inside the car for a minute. Over the last few days he’d had a strong impulse to come by. What would Deb say after all this time? Maybe he should have just called, but somehow this seemed easier. He took a deep breath, got out of the car, and listened to the snow on the front walk crunch under his feet. As soon as he rang the doorbell he heard barking inside, and he had to smile. He listened for footfalls but Valentino barked so loud, he couldn’t hear anything else.

After a minute he rang again and this time Valentino sounded like he’d go into orbit. Poor guy.

Deb seemed to be out. Judging from the amount of snow on the walk, she could be away. But why would she leave Valentino? While I’m here, he thought, maybe I’ll see if that nice torque wrench she gave me for my birthday is still in the garage.

He checked his key ring. Still had the keys for the house and the garage on this one. If it wasn’t in the garage, he could check he basement, too.

The wrench sat exactly where he’d left it, on the workbench in the garage. After he locked the garage, he spied the snow shovel leaning up by the fence near the back gate and decided to do Deb a favour. He put the wrench in his car and spent five minutes and clearing her front walk.

As he drove off, he felt sorry he’d missed her. Deb would have said he should have called first. Or that he maybe could have emailed. Or answered one of those emails she’d sent him. Yeah, he could have done all those things.

When he got home, he called and left a message on her machine. “Hey, Deb. It’s Joseph. I hope everything’s okay with you. It’s Tuesday, late afternoon. I dropped by your place today, but you weren’t there. Anyway, call me back when you get this message. Oh, and, uh, Happy New Year. Talk to you soon.” ******* The next day Joseph got a letter in the mail. From Deb, of all people. He sat down at the kitchen table, opened the purple envelope, and removed the letter, handwritten, on what looked to be heavy, handmade grey paper.

Dear Joseph, I have little hope that you’ll answer this or even read it. If you were going to respond to my phone calls or emails, I guess you would have long ago. But I think I owe it to myself to try again to tell you that I feel very hurt and humiliated by the way you’ve chosen to treat me. I don’t know what I did to deserve this, and you won’t tell me.

All I do know is that I miss you. I miss your laughter. I miss your company. I miss you so much.

38 Love always, Deb He read it over a few times, set it down on the table.

“Shit,” he said. He had a drink of water. Picked up the phone and called her again. And left another message.

“Deb, this is Joseph again. If you’re there, pick up the phone, okay? I got your letter. I – look, we need to talk. So please, give me a call when you get this message, okay?”

******* They’d met almost three years earlier.

“So before we get rolling with tonight’s film, The Sheik, starring Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayres, are there any questions?” Deb asked.

The tall man in the back put up his hand.

“Valentino was the big screen lover of his day, right? But what about his affair with Ramon Navarro?”

Deb smiled and said nothing at first. He smiled back. “You’ve been reading Hollywood Babylon.”.

Did he flush a little? “Yes, I have.”

Deb addressed the class. “Is there anyone here who hasn’t read Hollywood Babylon or heard about it?”

A few hands went up. Deb continued.

“For the benefit of those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Hollywood Babylon is an infamous book by avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger. He couldn’t find a US publisher for it, so it was published in France in 1959, and didn’t come out in the US until the mid-sixties, when it was immediately banned and not published again for ten years. It’s basically a collection of gossip, scandal and rumours. Bald sensationalism. Trashy photos of death scenes, that kind of thing. It’s been discredited by film scholars and historians. Their take on it is that Anger was bitter about being excluded from the film community and wrote this book in retaliation.”

“So none of it is true? Not even the story about Marie Prevost?”

“That’s a prime example of the garbage in this book. He says she was eaten by her dog. Yes, she died alone in her apartment. Of starvation, basically. Quite a sad story – she wanted to lose weight so she could get back into pictures after her career faltered, and ended up starving herself to death. Her dog nipped at her body in an effort to get her to wake up. And then years later, she’s remembered only because of this exaggerated story in Hollywood Babylon. Anyway. Enough about that for now. Let’s get Valentino underway.”

He’d dawdled around as the other students were clearing out. Finally he walked up to her.

“I’m enjoying the class,” he said.

“Glad to hear that, uh…sorry, your name’s slipped my mind.”

“Joseph. Morrison.”

“Oh, right, Joseph. Sorry, it takes me a while. And you were so quiet all through the first class – silent, you might say.”

“Silent. Ha ha.”

“Yes. Ha ha.”

“So, listen. Do you want to go for a drink?”

“What?” She looked a little perplexed, but smiled all the same.

“Don’t get me wrong, I just…”

She said nothing, kept smiling.

39 He looked at his feet. “Listen, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I would love to go for a drink with you.” ******* Saturday by the poolside after lunch, Mark Turner decided to call his home and check for messages. Someone from the college had called, said Deb hadn’t come to her class Tuesday and they couldn’t reach her, and did he know where she was?

Mark shook his head. Why hadn’t she changed her contact person to Joseph? Maybe dear Joseph wasn’t around anymore, after breaking up their marriage. Or maybe she just forgot to change it. The two of them were probably off somewhere and she’d neglected to tell the college. He went back to his paper.

But he couldn’t concentrate on it. That really wasn’t like Deborah. Then again, she had been full of surprises the last few years, he had to hand it to her. Joseph. The divorce.

Nadine came to towel off. “Anything happening at home?” she asked, drying her pixie-cut red hair.

“I don’t know. The college where Deb works called.”

“What does she teach again?”

“Silent Film Appreciation. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to watch a silent film, much less take a course on watching them. Anyway, they said she didn’t come in to work last week, and she hasn’t been answering her phone or e-mail.

It’s kind of weird.”

Nadine shrugged and sipped her Margarita. “Why don’t you call her?”

“I guess I will.”

There was no answer on Deb’s cell phone, so Mark left a message on her home number.

“Deb, it’s Mark. I’m calling from Arizona. The college called saying you didn’t come in to work Tuesday and they can’t get hold of you. Give me a call and let me know what’s up, okay?”

When Mark hadn’t heard from her the next day, he called again and got no answer. Then he decided he’d better call Joseph. He didn’t have the number and had to call directory assistance. He hadn’t been sure of the address, just knew roughly what area of the city Joseph lived in. After the operator put him through, it rang through to an answering machine.

“Joseph, this is Mark Turner. Deb’s ex. I hope this is the right number. Anyway, I’m sorry to bother you. I’m in Arizona right now and I got a message from the college saying Deb didn’t show up for work Tuesday and they hadn’t been able to get hold of her. I’m guessing you two are probably together somewhere. Could you please give me a call back and let me know what’s up? Thanks.”

Mark felt more at ease after he hung up. They’re away somewhere. Probably some mixup at the college with scheduling.

About an hour later he got a call from Joseph.

“Thanks for calling back, Joseph. So what’s up with Deb?” “Well, I don’t really know. I was just over there on Tuesday. In the neighbourhood and happened to drop by. I, uh…we haven’t seen each other in a while.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, it’s been quite a while. Anyway, she wasn’t home. I thought maybe she was away because there was a lot of snow on the walk. I called and left messages a couple of times, but she hasn’t called back.”

“Listen, do you mind going over there and checking in on her? Just making sure everything’s okay? I don’t know what’s going on. I thought you two had gone somewhere.”

“No. But I’ll go over there after I eat dinner. I’ll call you back and let you know what’s going on.”

“That would be great. I’d appreciate that.”

“No worries.”

40 ******* Valentino barked like a mad dog when Joseph rang the doorbell. He braced himself to be knocked over as soon as he opened the door, but instead the dog burned past him to relieve himself on the weeping birch on the front lawn. Then he came over to Joseph, dropped at his feet, whined a little.

He squatted and rubbed the trembling dog’s tummy. “Valentino! Hey, boy! How are you?”

Joseph stood and pushed the door open further but it stopped partway. The pit of his stomach clenched when he saw the pile of mail and newspapers that had been delivered through the mail slot and piled up on the floor.

“Deb?” he called. He went up the steps into the living room and saw that Valentino had been relieving himself on the mat in front of the patio door off the dining room. He threw the mat out on the deck until he could deal with it. He came back in and washed his hands at the kitchen sink. The place still smelled awful. The dog must have found more than one place to go.

He turned and saw that Valentino had managed to somehow get into the pantry and had eaten what had been in the empty dog food bag that lay on the floor.

“What is going on here?” he muttered, half to himself, half to the dog at his feet. “Deb would never leave you alone.”

“Deb?” he called as he walked down the hallway to the dark bedroom. “Deb, are you here?”

He reached into the room and flipped on the light switch.

“Oh, Deb,” he groaned. .He managed to lurch into the bathroom before he threw up.

******* Officers Barb Fitch and Tom Bulyea sipped coffee at Margaret Olson’s off-white French Provincial kitchen table. Margaret was Deb’s across-the-street neighbour. The oversized picture window in the living room of Margaret’s bi-level had an unobstructed view of Deb’s front yard and the front of her house. Valentino slept in a sunny corner near the couch.

“I saw him there that Tuesday,” Margaret said. “He lived there for a while, you know. For over a year, I’m pretty sure.

The girls are both gone off to school now, and Deb and Mark got divorced a couple of years ago. Of course, Joseph was on the scene before that, before Mark moved out. He was a student in that course she teaches. I’d see him parking down the block at night when Mark was away and walking over to Deb’s. Or he’d park his bike in the yard, so people wouldn’t see. Trying to be sneaky.”

Officer Fitch nodded. “So you hadn’t seen Mr. Morrison around in a while?”

“No. He moved out in the summer. As soon as Mark moved out, he moved in. But he rented a truck last July and took all his stuff. Poor Deb took it hard. I’ve been taking care of Valentino when they’re out of town, you know, since he was a pup.

And I didn’t see her come out of that house for days after he left, not even to walk Valentino. That Joseph should be ashamed of himself. Maybe he thinks because he’s tall and handsome he can get away with wrecking homes and breaking hearts, but I think it catches up with you. I remember one time –“ “So, ma’am, if we could get back to Tuesday, February 5th,” Officer Bulyea interrupted. “You say you saw Ms. Turner in the morning. What time was that?”

“Right around nine, about the time she always walked Valentino. She came back a little earlier than usual that day, but it was pretty cold out.”

“And then what time did you see Mr. Morrison?”

“Around 4:30 in the afternoon. He went to the front door, and she didn’t answer. Then he went around to the back.”

“Did you see him go to the back door?”

“I saw him go through the gate into the backyard. I can’t see the back door from here. He came back out a few minutes later and put something in his car. It looked like a wrench. And then he went into the backyard, got the shovel and cleared the walk. He put the shovel back and left.”

41 “So how long, all together, would you say he spent at Ms. Turner’s house?”

“Fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“Did you see him inside the house at any time?”

“No. But I can only see into the living room, so he could have been inside without me being able to see him.”

“And have you seen him return to Ms. Turner’s house at any time since then?”

“Just on the day that he let himself in to the house, and found her, I guess. The day the police came.” ******* Joseph rolled onto his side on the thin mattress in his dark cell. The police would get this all sorted out, wouldn’t they?

How could anyone think he’d killed her? Poor Deb. She was probably getting a big laugh out of all this.

Tired as he was, he hadn’t slept in days. But he couldn’t doze off for more than a few minutes at time. A light across the hall shone into his eyes, which didn’t make sleep easier.

Modern Times. He couldn’t stop thinking of it now. This was just like the part where the Tramp was mistaken for a communist and thrown in jail. He thought of the time they’d watched Modern Times together. The night he’d given her that silk nightgown, the one she’d been wearing when he found her.

When he found her. He’d give anything to be able to get that picture out of his mind. He rolled onto his back.

42

Feedback on “Ice” Liam Hogan: The writing is crisp, and the descriptions of the characters is strong, but truthfully, it is hard to see this story as meeting the remit of an "end of a world" - even at the smaller scale. Deb never feels like she is at an end, and Joseph - even in his cell with the evidence stacked against him, still trusts the Police to "get this all sorted". That aside, for this story to have the punch it should have, somehow you need to keep the conflict alive and strong, but I fear that that is gone when Joseph picks up the wrench and the dog is barking. Perhaps if he sees her footprints in the snow, perhaps if the reader is unsure if these are from the trip to the postbox, or something else she was planning to do, then we would not be clear what has happened to Deb.

Gillian McGrandles: If this were told from the dog’s point of view it might have been relevant to the competition theme. As it is told from 3 different people’s points of view (which the author didn’t pull off in a short story – too much) and not the dog’s at all I am baffled as to why it was even submitted, never mind shortlisted. The writing again has too much unnecessary description: ‘Tiny, slow baby steps’ ‘her head felt swollen, pulpy, tender’. If the only reason for all the silent movie references was to hint in a heavy handed way that the protagonist got eaten by her dog in the same way as a silent movie star did then it should have been cut – we understand. Awful, but I remembered more about the plot of this one than any of the others after the first reading.

Lucy Blackburn: 1. Has the makings of a great thriller.

2. This could've been a much darker story. As it is, you finish it and think "so what".

Overall: enjoyable read but ultimately failed to engage the reader. The only character you get a feel for is Deb but she essentially disappears from the story. For this to work, the reader needed a stronger connection with the two men and a greater focus on the impact of Deb's death on them.

Jason Pursey: Ice reads as a technically adept mystery short, the type of story you might see as a brief for an episode of CSI. What works against the story, in this case, is the relevance to the theme: this is a personal ending of one woman (and, perhaps, her former partner), but it is firmly sandboxed into this space.

For what is essentially a character piece, the characters themselves seem fairly generic. The not-quite-triangle between Deb, Joseph and Mark lacks tension – largely due to the absence of the main participant for the most part of the story – and although the conversation between Joseph and Mark seems suitably stilted it doesn't feel that there is any conflict between the two.

The overall feeling with this story is that it is written aptly, but has turned up in the wrong place.

43

Will Robertson: I liked I liked that the death in the story linked back to another death mentioned during it, which lets the reader infer something horrific without its needing to be explained. It was also nice to see an indifferent dog in a story , rather than a faithful servant!

I didn’t like I wasn’t sure that bringing Mark into the story was necessary, since he doesn’t really affect the outcome – although his section did add in some background to the situation.

Overall I felt that this story would actually have worked better longer – it feels like a lot has been packed in and more character development and background would have been welcome. I liked the core idea – an accident and a misunderstanding, and I think that more depth to the characters would have increased the sense of tragedy.

44

Pacific Call

By Thomas M King It had been one year nine months and twenty one days since the blackness. Every day hence Yumi had been drawn back to the beach. Inside her frail and timorous frame a fractured soul wept like an open wound. On most days her enfeebled legs barely held her up. But she kept coming back. On the sand she felt the connection, each docile wave called her name. Something mesmeric perpetually pulling her back.

It had been one year nine months twenty one days and one hour since hell rose up and ripped away her reason to live. On that frigid silent morning the putrid blackness came up and over them and then it just kept coming. She begged it to stop, but it kept coming, driving her down. Yumi could still feel the cold drilling in to her bones; still see the dark bile. It just kept coming and coming and it was blacker than black it was putrid and foul. The devils swill. But it just kept coming, higher and higher, deeper and deeper, surging over her strong, hard and cold; so very cold against her lower back.

Clamour filled her head as the shrieking banshee cry of the tsunami alarm vibrated through the village air. Frightened she ran with baby Meiko tight to her breast, the infant safe in her warm grasp. The surge of the third wave pushed her legs forward cutting her down. The helpless baby tumbled from her loving clutch. The warm soft bundle in the white shawl cast adrift floating beyond her mother’s straining arms. Their eyes connected and spoke, baby Meiko and mother Yumi connecting for an intimate but final moment. The putrescent bubbling water parted and sucked the fresh life down into the heinous evil darkness.

Toshio Ogawa stared at his reflection in the coffee shop window. The dim glass covered in a film of dust threw back an older more desolate face.

It had been one year nine months and twenty one days since the ground under him shifted. One year nine months twenty one days and one hour since his firm grip on her forearm broke and she slithered into the

45

swirling pool of oblivion.

She had smiled at him as she slipped under the churning murkiness, their bond still strong. A black soup of twisted humans and debris charged through the narrow village street. Dirty thick liquid thundered over him, overpowering his grip on her, she thrashed wildly but the fight was lost. He watched hapless, as she evaporated under the bubbling black stew of death.

He was an infectiously optimistic and generous man but since that day he had been in a state of shock and the deepest, darkest depression. His vibrant sparkling brown eyes were no longer turned up at the corners. Now they drooped, drawn down to earth by the raw gravity from under the tainted and useless saline

impregnated soil.

In the reflection behind his own wretchedness he noticed Yumi and his dull eyes tracked her forsaken figure as it moved from right to left across the grubby window. Her despondent form a familiar daily sight to him. The defeated woman did not walk with a purposeful gait. Her round shoulders were flaccid while her fragile legs dragged her forward. As she scurried towards the beach on her daily pilgrimage, the head of the young mother never rose to embrace the crisp sun reflecting up from the tranquil Pacific Ocean.

Toshio saw it again in his mind’s eye, he had prayed for it to stop but it kept coming. It just kept coming.

He was disturbed out of his melancholic state by the cheerful ‘ping’ of the small bronze bell. The coffee shop door slid firmly open. Sato-san bowed in his direction, her mature back forming a graceful arc.

She was now nearly eighty years old but she looked older.

It had been one year nine months and twenty one days since that day. Her early morning walk had always been the same, peaceful, spiritual and normally uneventful.

She awoke clear headed and prepared as ever with a simple breakfast of steamed rice, miso soup, grilled

fish and pickles. By seven thirty five her stride was robust and direct. By eight fifteen Sato-san had scaled the densely wooded escarpment and was in her element.

She was deep in the protective woods when the ground rumbled in anger underneath her. Her rugged hands had already plucked more than one hundred small fruits. The huge tremor pulsed through the land shedding ripe plums conveniently by her feet; but she took no interest in the liberated produce. In silent horror she turned and watched through the swaying branches as in the distance the blackness rose up and moved towards the village.

The steady stream of day trippers loved her umeboshi, pickled plums, her hobby had given her a rea-

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son to live. The café which was also the post office and village store, sold her delicate hand crafted pickles

and jam. The visitors from Tokyo and beyond gave her a living. Now a word she didn’t understand had diminished her existence. She was told that something was found in a jar of pickles in Yokohama bought by well intentioned tourists: Caesium!

Sato-sans umeboshi was finished and so was she.

First she felt the cold wind on her warm cheeks. The chilly gust rode ahead of the shockwave steaming inland ahead of the massive turbulent walls of water. It was a rumble then her elderly ears picked up the hideous roar. She watched in silence and disbelief as the horizon came alive and moved unyieldingly to-

wards her. Tears of pain streaming from her tired face the noise of death and destruction filled her head; taking her breath and soul away. Through the trees she loved, trees that gave her life she watched, muted into submission as the blackness rose towards her.

A violent torrent of flotsam filled the valley below her. Ruptured houses, twisted vehicles, fishing boats and despairing human faces slithered past her incredulous eyes.

The water just kept coming and coming and coming. It was blacker than black it was putrid and foul, the devils brew. She prayed for it to stop but it just kept coming.

Sato-san looked out towards the sea shore and slowly raised her hand to her mouth. The dignified elderly lady inhaled a gasp of cool sea air. Toshio looked frantically in the reflection of the glass scanning it for activity. Unable to see what his crestfallen neighbour was looking at he slowly rose up from the wooden stool. Cautiously he traced the line of Sato-sans gaze until together they watched, both stunned into acquiescent quietness. A beautiful early flurry of snow had begun to drift in.

In the distance they saw Yumi wearing a vivid yuzen dyed kimono as she waded into the Pacific Ocean. Like pistons on a steam engine her weak legs were now driving her forward; she pushed on through

the surging surf. Her eyes fixed on the horizon the distrait mothers heart did not rise or fall it beat out a steady calm rhythm.

She punched on into the Pacific Ocean her legs now alive with vitality pouring her forward and deeper. With tenderness the ocean embraced her, enthusiastically wrapping a saliferous blanket around her waist. The fresh clean water pouring over her favourite delicately embroidered Obi, Kimono belt. Still she carried on into the infinite green sea until her shoulders were draped in the white foaming surf.

Yumi’s head slipped under the thick marine blanket without a fuss, and she was gone.

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Feedback on “Pacific Call” Liam Hogan: Based on a real life tragedy, a true (though localised!) apocalypse, this attempts to depict the longer term effects of that disaster, which is an intriguing arena to explore. Each of the three characters have been powerfully affected by it, and yet, it is difficult for us to empathise with them, perhaps partly because it is three characters, perhaps because they only interact loosely.

With a tighter emotional bind between them, and more "This is how I feel now" descriptions, and possibly by employing a somewhat simpler voice (these after all are not sophisticated narrators, the complex language of the story does not therefore ring quite true for the protagonists!) then there is a deep vein here to be mined, but for this reader at least, this misses its target a little.

Gillian McGrandles: Dreadful. As soon as I read the second line: ‘Inside her frail and timorous frame a fractured soul wept like an open wound’ it was all I could do not to throw up. The author drowns the story of an experience of a tsunami with too much descriptive rubbish. Choice of language is not for me: ‘The helpless baby tumbled from her loving clutch’ – just terrible. ‘Churning murkiness’ – really murky. I can’t believe how bad this is.

Lucy Blackburn: 1. The 3 perspectives are nicely woven together. This gives the impression of a moment in time which works well in a short story.

2. The narrative style is overly elaborate and deliberately "poetic" Overall: the author fails to build a rapport with the characters with the result that the story feels unfinished. When you couple this with the language, you're left with a very disjointed reading experience.

Jason Pursey: Pacific Call makes an attempt at personalising the recent focus on tsunami disasters in the news – Japan and Bali come immediately to mind – and also in pop culture, such as in The Impossible. There has been much attention given to this idea and the story is a difficult sell in what is essentially, and excuse the pun, a saturated market.

The multiple perspectives in the story make it difficult to form a solid attachment to any of the characters, and at this length a focus on a single character would have had more impact. In particular, a deeper exploration of Sato-san would be welcome, as her character has the most engaging backstory. There is a definite feeling of connection to her life and how it has been affected by the disaster. Yumi and Toshio's stories are lacking in comparison, and there is little sense of who these people were before their lives were so painfully destroyed. Also, the repeating of the time since the event becomes quickly tiresome. It does serve to frame the concept of how critical this moment had been in the lives of the characters, but detracts from the readability of the piece.

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Will Robertson: I liked I did like the idea behind this story, of three characters with their own personal tragedies to bear in the aftermath of a terrible event. There were some lovely touches – like the business-destroying caesium – and it feels as though some research has gone into the story’s setting.

I disliked I felt that the writing style didn’t do justice to the story’s rich setting or the ambitious structure (it’s tough to cover three viewpoints in two time-points in a story of this length), and that this stopped the story from realising its potential.

The prose was rather over-written. I think that sometimes it’s better to let simple sentences speak for themselves than to bolster them with adverbs etc – perhaps particularly in a short story. I also thought that in places it was hard to distinguish the jump from recollection to present – use of italics, for example, might help to provide a cue that the scene had changed.

Overall I did think that some stylistic issues prevented this story from reaching its potential, but that potential is definitely there. Overall I think it is begging for a re-write, as it really wouldn’t take much to address some of these issues and deliver this tragic, powerful story far more effectively.

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And So Farewell For those that join us here, at the very end of issue three, having shared with us the laughter and tears contained in both the stories and the critical feedback, we open our arms to you and embrace you in a fond farewell. As with the two previous issues we feel like we are growing and learning each time, finding out more about the diverse preoccupations of our contributors and the tastes of our readers. Maybe you agree with us that the things that our judges are calling for seem to be uncannily consistent, almost as if there are some underlying rules to creating a good story and engaging the reader.

The one that springs to mind with the current crop of stories is the old adage “make me care”.

Stories work if they spark emotions; thoughts on their own do not do it. The language, the setting, the characters, the plot, and the focus of the story all need to be in alignment. They need to be refined, and conducted like instruments in an orchestra, all in service of the greater goal behind any work of art: to give people an emotional, visceral experience. Ideas alone are for scientists and text books.

At least that is one interpretation of this feedback, and how an eventual winner emerged from our set of stories. Other interpretations and differing points of view are always welcome here at The Red Line.

Until next time, good luck with whatever it is you’re going to do when you stop reading this page, and we hope that you enjoy it.

Toby and Stephen July 2013

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