The Journey Prize Stories 25 Read online

  And if you stretch the skin with your fingers a little bit that seems to help, but be careful not to do that too often, because eventually you start rubbing the skin off and getting pimples and little scabs and then everyone starts going Emily there is something the matter with your face, are you sick

  And you can try saying

  take me to the regional specialist in acute juvenile osteoporosis and virulent pathological foramina for a probative bone biopsy and a regimen of aggressive biphosphonate administration

  and feed me exclusively on dairy products and broccoli

  and as a preventative measure have my body encased in porcelain and have my skeleton pre-emptively remodelled in titanium alloys

  and prepare the hip replacements knee replacements elbow replacements maxilla replacement rib replacements tarsal replacements mandible replacement cranium replacement et cetera et cetera

  to fill the spongy hollows left when my bones are cobweb rolls of nothing, someday

  And you can try saying all that

  but you won’t say it, not really

  because you are six years old and your father is dead of cancer and it has been a strain even to hold diagnosis in your mind

  or sarcoma.

  ––

  No one could see the child lying face-up under the altar. It was a poured concrete slab lain across two poured concrete pillars and the child’s body beneath it crossed it midway like a small T. Chips and chinks in the poured concrete like hieroglyphs and braille spoke down at her from the table’s underbelly, spoke Joshua Samuel David Isaiah, spoke Hungry, spoke Camel Puppy Pony Elephant, spoke Jesus Christ Nazareth Nazareth, spoke Toothache and Daddy and Sleep. The child stuck her finger in her mouth and chewed it while her brain lay aching.

  The purple frontal hung across the altar made the child invisible. The cloth made the grey purple, made the white-grey purple, made her skin purple and the shadows purple. Her feet poking out beyond the frontal, she knew, were not purple but somehow still invisible, for the men and the women out beyond it were going, He was so young and Thank you for coming, and never, There are his daughter’s feet.

  So the child with a hole in the middle of her middle made a purple duck come out from a purple concrete crack, waddled it across to the middle of the stone pavement hanging over her, and said to it, My bones hurt.

  The duck said, Try drinking some milk.

  She chewed her finger and told the duck that they were all out of milk and also that this was a church and a funeral. The duck said, Later, then. And she turned him into a mouse and then an airplane and then she made the whole altar into sponge candy in her mind and closed her eyes and dissolved it in dark.

  Outside her cave there were men and women going Hum in a lake of sound. The child, behind her closed eyes, saw a white hand and then a smear-coloured curtain and a mouth that could not shut, but then she sent those things away into the dark where they could dissolve into nothing, into the nothing of nothing. In their place she left a yellow dog, shining.

  After the mother with pearls lifted the purple cloth, the uncle who was with her reached underneath and took the child into his arms. He carried her sleeping past the nodding priest and the sad-eyed grandfather and the hatted aunt dabbing a handkerchief under her eyes and saying, Oh Herbert, dear Emily.

  And the uncle took the child to his car where he spread her out sleeping on the back seat, and when the child awoke the uncle was sitting behind the wheel in the parking lot with the radio on. The uncle said something warm and handed her a cube of the yellow sponge candy.

  She lay on her cheek and pressed the nougat between her palms until the sweat melted it into sugary glue, and the uncle hummed with the radio all the while weeping, Oh my love, my darling.

  Caitlin Rhys’s brother is allergic to pine trees. have announced that the funding for the facility

  Is that so. will be cancelled

  He is so allergic to pine trees that if there is a pine tree five miles away from him he, he dies. through twenty fifteen the announcement was met with disappointment and outrage by the

  I don’t think that’s true, Em. volunteer groups petitioning for

  Yes it is, it is true. improved access

  Where could he get that he would be five miles away from pine trees all the time? They live just across town. There are tons of pine trees around. to resources in the downtown area they believe that the gordon centre provides a nexus for critical support services josie glieson reports protestors at the corner of houston and third avenue wave signs

  He wears a mask. reading save the

  He wears a mask. gordon centre save

  So he can’t smell the pine trees, ever. It covers his whole face and his nose and his eyes and everything and he can go anywhere with his mask on but if he takes it off, he dies. our city most of the protestors are volunteers with the social justice groups associated with the centre or beneficiaries of their services tammy sunwail is a retired librarian

  Hmm. and volunteer at literart a nonprofit group aimed at promoting adult literacy there are

  Except that he maybe has to take it off to eat but then Did you pick up your room like I asked you? so many people that benefit from our services and from all the services provided the gordon centre

  Em? is one of the best things going for our city if the mayor can’t see

  Can you be allergic to a colour? that he’s in trouble he’s in big trouble another protestor

  Did you hear what I asked? who asked not to be named said

  Like can you be allergic to yellow? that she received daycare services

  No. Did you pick up your room? through the gordon centre for two years i don’t know what i would have done without them

  Yes. i don’t know

  Did you really? what anyone

  Except what if it made you sick sometimes to look at a colour. And What if everything became that colour and it would be terrible. would have done meanwhile city

  Emily, I haven’t got time for this right now. I told you Sam and Ella are coming over tonight and I want you to clean up your toys before they get here. I don’t have time to help you with everything right now, so will you please go finish tidying your room? counsellors argue that all essential services provided at the gordon centre will continue to be provided by official city programming

  And like maybe if you also became that colour and then you would be allergic to yourself and your body would start thinking it was a disease and eating itself and then maybe by the end there wouldn’t be you anymore. throughout the downtown area chris repairs to the sutton island ferry pier destroyed a week ago in a ferry collision are nearly complete the metro transport authority announced this morning that the regular service schedule is set to resume on monday barring

  Stop scratching your face. complications meanwhile ferry

  I’m going to die. service to sutton

  Not anytime soon, you’re not. island remains on a reduced provisional schedule doctors at rottmann memorial hospital believe their patients may

  Still. have been

  PHILIP HUYNH

  GULLIVER’S WIFE

  When her husband, Thuong, told Josephine that Vancouver was bilingual, that it was just as French as it was English – like the rest of Canada – she believed him. There was no need to go to Montréal, where some of her friends would end up. Vancouver would be as fine a place as any to continue life.

  Until her last day in Saigon, Josephine taught French in primary school, refusing to admit that French would be useless to her students once the Communists took over. Her great regret was never getting to see any of them discover The Stranger. But at least she got to leave Vietnam in an airplane, not like her friends. She fled to Hong Kong with Thuong and his mother. Thuong returned to studying economics now that his military career was finished. In the year they spent in Hong Kong, while Thuong applied to universities all over the world, Josephine picked up more Cantonese than English, though all she could really do in Cantonese
was haggle down the price of vegetables.

  Two universities in the Vancouver area offered Thuong scholarships. All else being equal, Thuong chose the school located in the mountains because such a school is, naturally, more auspicious than a school by the sea. When they arrived, the only thing French about Vancouver was the bilingual grocery labels.

  Now, seven years on, their son Christian set for kindergarten, the family rents a basement suite on Fleming Street in East Vancouver, and Thuong is still working on his PhD. Josephine’s English is much improved, although she still prefers to read the grocery labels in French. She occasionally watches the French broadcast of the CBC, even though the Québécois accent will always sound foreign. Maybe it is just as well that they ended up in Vancouver instead of Montréal.

  Josephine sits in with Christian for the first few classes, because he is a weeper when she leaves him alone. She doesn’t like what she sees. She understands that in public school the children don’t wear uniforms, but most boys here don’t even wear collars. In Vietnam even the poor wore uniforms with stiff collars, even if they only had one shirt that their mothers had to iron each morning. And everything here is in English. Nothing is taught in French. Josephine pulls Christian out of kindergarten after only two weeks.

  There is a Catholic school close to home. She had not considered St. Maurice’s earlier because it charged tuition – a few hundred dollars and the cost of a uniform. They will have to budget better if Christian is to go. For dinner there will be fewer noodles in each bowl of pho. She will have to cut the beef into thinner slices. But it will be worth it. St. Maurice’s teaches French.

  The French language conjures up everything Josephine is fond of about Vietnam, of grey-green margouillats climbing the Doric columns of the school where she taught, of nuns chewing on betel leaves while tracing their sisters’ steps across the courtyard, of ham and baguettes. What happens to wine when it is allowed to breathe in the open air? Josephine is not an expert on wines, but she imagines it is similar to the alchemy that occurs in her head when she inhales French. French takes her back home more than Vietnamese does, Vietnamese being, these days, the language of arguments over chores and the future.

  No one notices them when they enter St. Maurice’s. The teacher is writing on the chalkboard: “le chat,” “le chien,” “au pays,” and other short words arranged like little bon bons on a plate. The teacher’s back is turned to the pupils, who are scattered throughout the classroom amongst the books, toys, and cubbyholes.

  Josephine sits on a popsicle-orange chair in the corner and Christian stands by her side, his hand on her shoulder. The teacher turns around and calls the children to attention, ignorant of Josephine’s presence.

  There are many things here that remind Josephine of her classroom in Vietnam. There is, for example, the alphabet that snakes across the top of the walls, the various accent marks hanging over the vowels. There are familiar books, which seem beyond the grasp of five-year-olds, but which thrill her: Tin Tin, Les Fables de La Fontaine, Le Petit Prince.

  But here class is held in a portable with the musty smell of plaster, wet wool, and rain-drenched wood. And here the pupils come in varying colours – brown, yellow, and white – though the squealing of children is the same everywhere.

  All of this is to be expected. What is surprising is that the French teacher does not have a Québécois accent. It is Parisian, like the nuns who raised Josephine. And that the accent belongs to a man.

  The kindergarten teacher is very tall and wears a yellow bow tie over a blue sweater-vest, both as bright as crayons, and a five o’clock shadow. He is like Gulliver as he tries to herd the children (dangling from window sills, buried in plastic toys) to the worn-out polka dot rug in the centre of the classroom.

  Josephine hoped to simply drop Christian off, but already he is fidgeting with his clip-on tie. She knows Christian will start wailing the moment she leaves him.

  “Attention,” says the teacher, in French. No response, so he claps his hands. Nothing. He sucks in his breath to let out a holler, then sees Josephine sitting in the corner.

  “You’re a teacher?” he says.

  “No. Not here.”

  “Oh, I see,” he says. “The new boy. You can leave him.”

  “He will be a nuisance to you if I leave him alone.” She says this in French, the first French she has uttered in seven years: “Il sera une nuisance pour vous si je le laisse seul.” She is not a smoker, but she can imagine the feeling of a long-awaited relapse. Blood rushes to her head.

  Meanwhile the children have stopped in place and look over at Josephine. She claps her hands. “Over to the front,” she says in French.

  “I can …” says the teacher, then loses his train of thought as the children gather on the rug at the centre of the classroom for their morning alphabet lesson.

  The copper statue of General Tran Hung Dao beside Thuong’s desk is not the image that most are familiar with – that of Vietnam’s great hero who fought off the Mongol invaders almost a millennia before Ho Chi Minh thwarted the French and Americans. It is not the General Tran struck in the tunic, cloak, and shoulder armour of full battle regalia, his dark beard in warring bristle, one finger pointing ahead – to a distant enemy or wind-swept oasis Thuong is not sure. In this version, which stands three feet tall, General Tran is dressed as a scholar king. His eyes are just as piercing, but tempered with sympathy. His beard is a pointed wisp in repose. He wears a turban, not his armoured helmet. His belt is a thin bolt wrapped around a scholar’s gown, embroidered with a pattern of clouds. His sword rests in its sheath. In his hand is instead a rolled-up scroll. His victory over the Mongol oppressors is behind him, his fate as a deity lies ahead.

  Thuong rescued the statue from the temple in his neighbourhood in Saigon. Who knows what the Communists would have done if they had gotten their hands on it. Thuong packed it in a huge steamer trunk that belongs to Josephine, swaddled in Josephine’s silk dresses.

  The statue stands in the corner of the study that doubles as their bedroom, the only space in the basement where there’s room. When Thuong sits at his desk, he meets the General at eye level. It is still beautiful, although the copper is turning green-blue. Thuong isn’t sure whether it is proper to regard the statue as an object of beauty. He is not sure if the look on the General’s face is meant to instill awe, or fear, or devotion, or all of these things at once, and if so in what proportions. This is what he thinks about when he looks upon the General, when he should be working on his dissertation.

  Sometimes he thinks the General speaks to him. The General has goaded him to study harder for his exams. He has commanded Thuong to settle on a dissertation topic, even though it may not be the perfect choice. Thuong knows that it is improper to pretend that an object of worship would stoop to be Thuong’s personal academic mentor. But Thuong can’t help himself.

  Thuong wishes the statue wasn’t such a distraction from his studies. Heaven knows, both the university and the Canadian government have given Thuong enough scholarships, stipends, and breaks to get him this far. They have even supplied him with his own IBM PC, which takes up most his desk, and a daisy wheel printer that rocks the walls when it runs.

  But the General is always staring at him, unblinking.

  Thuong gets so dizzy sometimes with all his thoughts that he has to stand up, stretch out. Get some fresh air. Call his friend Fred Wong, another economics student. See maybe if there’s a card game he can join in Chinatown, just some penny ante table. Just to take his mind off things.

  The students call the teacher Monsieur LaForge, though Josephine has learned that his first name is Paul. Against the walls of Paul’s classroom are little framed pieces of paper containing pithy quotes in the French language:

  “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”

  – Marcel Proust

  “Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.”

  – Winston C
hurchill

  “Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.”

  – Marie Curie

  Josephine can’t help but to ask Paul about them.

  “It’s for the children to read,” he says.

  “You can’t expect them to absorb all this wisdom,” says Josephine.

  “When I am done they should at least be able to mouth the words, if not understand them.”

  Josephine has attended the half-day kindergarten all week. Christian starts crying even if she gets up for the washroom, and has not improved.

  Paul was at first annoyed by Josephine’s presence. It was one thing for five-year-olds to judge him, it was another thing to have an adult’s eyes on him as well. But Paul cannot deny the calming effect that Josephine has on all the children. When she is not in the room they not only fidget, as five-year-olds do, but cough, go glassy-eyed, snap at each other, droop, make a break for the Lego. Perhaps it has to do with Paul’s deep, sonorous voice delivered at the pace of a metronome, a voice that could command the attention of a jury but which lies outside the register of young children. Josephine just barks across the room when there’s defiance. She has a tone that corrals the children when they lose their focus on Paul.

  It is during a usual rendition of “Ballade à la lune,” when the children start laughing in the middle of the song, that Paul can smell sulphur. The children pinch their noses, then point fingers at each other, and then the fingers settle on a little red-headed girl with a sombre expression. The smell gathers strength. As the girl’s pallor matches her hair and tears roll down her face, the children laugh harder and clear a radius around her.

  Josephine comes to the girl, checks under her navy dress, and picks her up by the armpits.