Tag: prose

“The Best Lover” – Charlotte Joyce Kidd

Twin_Blouse

I think the best lover would be really scared of dying. They would come home early every night. They would never bike in a busy city, never drive at all. They would never jaywalk. They would never do drugs—maybe pot once in a while but only on a couch, between four walls, when they’d checked the forecast and there was no chance of natural disaster. They wouldn’t drink too much, make enemies, ever go off their anti-depressants. Even when they stopped being mine, I wouldn’t have to worry. There would be no chance of disappearing endings, of being left holding feelings severed at one end.

I think the best lover would want to spend all their time with me. They wouldn’t be able to imagine anything else they’d rather be doing. They’d hold my hand while they went to the toilet. We’d reuse the toothpaste foam. When we’d walk in public, they’d tangle their fingers in my hair, palms not enough, scalp warmer, closer to bone, closer to brain. They’d cancel their Saturday nights, make every hour 8 a.m. Sunday, when together is unthinking. They’d sit behind me in my classes. They’d finish my sentences in therapy. They would text me once an hour just to tell me a joke.

I think the best lover would have a million lives, so that each time they fell out of love with me they could be reborn. They would walk in the door of the night they first met me, look around. They would come up and say hi, knowing nothing yet.

 

these words by Charlotte Joyce Kidd were inspired by the work of Miza Coplin

“Checkmate” – Manahil Bandukwala

centaurette

You enter a room with a checkered floor, a chessboard sprawling outwards. Your side is just you; on the other is a jester, a devil and a centaurette with a gun. You have no weapons. You don’t know the rules. The game is stacked against you before it begins.

White starts. The jester advances forward five spaces.

Black’s turn. You feel behind you for the doorway you entered through, but it’s not there. The only way to move is forward. You brace yourself to run, and smack against air. Staggering back, you find yourself a space ahead of where you were. Only one square at a time for you. A bruise starts to form on your cheek.

White. The devil moves to stand on your left side, brushing your leg with its pointed tail.

Black. You take a step forward and the devil moves with you but doesn’t touch you. There is a window across the room, your only way out. You count the number of steps to the mountains outside. Three. If you survive even one more step forward, it’ll be a miracle.

White. The centaurette cocks her gun and shoots. The bullet flies between your legs and goes cleanly through the wall behind. She gallops forward and stops two squares in front of you, right in front of the window. Her smile teases you to come forward and take her crown; she knows all the rules to the game and you’ve only figured out one.

Black. You stick to your plan. One square forward—the devil moves too. The jester dances around outside confines of boxes.

White. Nothing. They’re waiting.

Black. The window is almost there, but the centaurette sits spread across the tiles.

White. A shadow belonging to no one flits across the wall. Everyone jumps in surprise, including the centaurette. The square in front of you is empty.

Black. You leap forward and jump out the window, falling past storeys until you hit the ground. Glass rains over you, cutting into your skin. You hear a faraway giggle echo through the trees. You are a lump of flesh lying in a bush on a riverbank. The river snakes through the landscape, washing your blood away.

 

these words by Manahil Bandukwala were inspired by the work of Miza Coplin

“Starlight” – Nailah King

kyoto nocturne ii_linbaoling

Lena loved to move.

Through space, through life and across lands.

The first thing she ever learned when travelling is that, as you land, the lights dotted along the skyline will take your breath away.

One summer she crept onto roofs in Barcelona waiting for nightfall. Against the purple sky, lights twinkled back at her, the warm air rushing over her, her wine-kissed lips chapped against the sea air.

In movement, she felt free. Each new place cast a spell on her—she walked differently. Sometimes a stride of confidence, sometimes one of fear.

Her mother often asked her: “When are you going to settle down? When will your heart be still?”

She couldn’t answer.

Her mind was often so cluttered. A voice would whisper darkness into her ear. When she couldn’t move, she woke up, either alone or with a lover, in despair.

Many nights she’d walk along the train tracks behind her childhood home, wondering if she’d be hit and if she’d be grateful. Or, sometimes, she wondered if she could run fast enough to hop onto the train and ride it to places unknown.

Bright lights were a beacon of hope; new experiences and people.

On sleepless nights, she curled up by the window waiting for sunlight. Her body marked by tiny incisions from the past, she thought about each scar—a map of the past. She wondered why there weren’t passports for sorrow. To mark the ebb and flow of sadness and joy, destruction and rebuilding, regression and growth.

Once, when she was in the hospital, she booked a flight on her phone.

The nurse screamed at Lena but it didn’t really matter. The nurse’s words sounded warped, gargled even, the onslaught of disappointment and disbelief drifted over her. All she could hear was the sound of the ocean. She closed her eyes.

She heard the blaring sound of the train horn and raced along the tracks, dawn rising behind her.

 

these words by Nailah King were inspired by the work of Lin Bao Ling

“Tickets and Rides” – Josh Elyea

nocturne with ferris wheel_linbaoling

The neon from the carnival lights, bright against the black sky, hurts my eyes when I stare at it for too long. It’s hard to tell where the light ends and the black begins; no matter how hard I try to hone in on the exact place where they meet, the edge never reveals itself. Sometimes our love is like that, too; even when I want to, I can never really find where the good bits stop and the bad bits start.

It feels as though something horrible is about to happen; the air is heavy, laden, just as it is before the breaking of a storm. I like storms. I remember fondly those moments when I would sit, as a child, on the porch swing with my mother and we’d watch the thunder clouds roll in across the fields. With the defiance found only in youth, I’d scream back towards the lightning with all the breath in my lungs, as my mother shook her head.

You have to whisper to the thunder, she’d say. That’s the only way it can hear you.

My wife looks like my mother, a little.

 The heavy air feels hot on my skin, and I worry my hands are too clammy to reach out and grasp the woman next to me. I do it anyway. As I do, I say that ferris wheels aren’t supposed to move this fast, my darling. They aren’t supposed to fly.

Cotton candy flavored kisses, corny lines like you complete me, cocaine drips and my corduroys rubbing together with that shhhk, shhhk. The drugs were her idea, I swear. Something about shaking the monotony of Saturday night rituals, of having a suburban crisis of faith.  

Stopped at the top, I stare deep into the sky. It’s moving, like a Rorschach without the white. Pulsing, and at the very edges of my eyes, from below, the neon creeps into view. Who knew a glimpse into the abyss could be bought with a single carnival ticket. Here I thought it would cost me a white picket fence.

 

these words by Josh Elyea were inspired by the work of Lin Bao Ling

“Beige” – Jo-Ann Zhou

Icy-Void---Selina-Vesely-(2017)

The oddest thing about this new land was the blandness of things constructed by people. She remarked on her first day that all the houses were more or less the same colour. They were brown or grey, or varying combinations of brown and grey. Occasionally a house would have a colourful door. She learnt about a third colour, beige, that described most of the houses in her new land, and she decided it was also the best way to describe the food.

All the food was varying shades of brown and beige. Potato. Bread. Noodles. Meat. Repeat. All brown or beige. Sometimes there were splashes of red for things that were supposed to taste like tomatoes, like this sweet concoction ketchup, but it really didn’t taste like tomatoes at all. Apparently there were colourful foods in this new land too but someone told her that not everyone could afford them.

By far the best thing about this new land were the colours in the trees and on the ground. In summer, there were so many shades of green. It seemed almost a shame that there was just one word—green—to describe all of these magnificent colours, as if a mere word could capture the magic of this land of forests. Back home, all the trees and bushes were the same dull matte green covered by a thick film of grime. In retrospect, maybe her old land was best described by that new word, beige, when it came to the flora.

She was pleasantly surprised by the explosion of oranges, reds, yellows and purples that came in autumn, another new word, and was amazed by the new textures of the leaves which crunched beneath her feet. When winter came, the newest word of all, the white was blindingly beautiful; she wanted to touch it all the time, except that it was cold and afterwards her hands would turn red.

The white stayed for a very long time, much longer than the greens, the oranges and the yellows. She could tell her parents were getting impatient with the white and browns. How dull this was, especially next to the brown houses and the brown food, they complained. They missed the colourful houses, the colourful foods. They missed seeing plants all year round, even if they were dull matte green and covered in grime. Sometimes they were so sad they would cry, or yell at each other, or call family back home to cry and yell. She thought about how happy they had been when they first arrived, when the colours were there to welcome them.  She was certain that there were still colours out in the woods, and she decided to go collect some to make her parents happy again.

Down the road from her new brown-and-beige house was a little pond covered with a thin layer of grey-white ice. The ice, which had previously been solid white-blue, had begun to turn into lacey webs, peeking through to still dark grey water. She peered over the side of the pond and spied some reds and oranges. The leaves from autumn! They were still there, in the dark grey water, just beyond the thin white ice. How lovely it would be to rescue the trapped colourful leaves from their cold wet prison, and bring them home to make her parents happy again. She would dry them off and make a bouquet, she decided. Slowly, she shifted herself down, sliding her purple boots onto the grey-white ice, over to the edge of the dark grey water, when she heard a CRACK beneath her feet.

The local newspaper tweeted the next morning: “Illegal immigrant, aged 6, dead in Greenpoint Pond.”  The comments read: “serves them right anyway, they get what they deserve,” “now deport her family before they get on our EI.”

 

these words by Jo-Ann Zhou were inspired by the work of Selina Vesely

 

From the author: Aside from the ending, the rest of the piece is actually based entirely off of my own personal experience; even though I was born in Canada, I moved abroad to Peru when I was a baby (thus the inspiration for the “beige” land, since Lima is very dusty) and moved back when I was five years old. So, even though I’m “Canadian” I still feel as though I’ve lived through the “immigrant experience” since I had to learn the language and get used to the new food and customs. I wanted to write a piece that conveyed the mixed emotions of arriving in a new country: the excitement of discovering new things  but also missing certain things from home. As a kid, that also meant watching my parents work through those emotions too, which I partially conveyed here. The jarring ending is a second commentary on my experience as a “kind of immigrant”; most of the time I love living in Canada and have a great sense of wonder and respect for it, but this is occasionally jolted by rude comments from strangers who don’t think that immigrants belong. The juxtaposition is meant to show the reader how jarring these comments can be, as they often come totally unprovoked and with no context.

“Healing” – Shagufe Hossain

Chelsea Rushton_In Which God is a Woman, part ii 300 dpi

It is not the same, the rain here and the rain there. Even though the sky is heavy with untold secrets the same way. Even though when the clouds breathe, they breathe tears. Even though it falls, as it does everywhere. It is not the same. I suppose it can never be the same in any two places. But it takes a while to know the difference.

People are people and places are places. But the earth breathes differently when water touches it, depending on where it is. Sometimes, touches make it shiver and shrivel away. Or don’t make it any more or any less than it is. And sometimes, touches make it come alive. You can tell how the water makes the earth feel from the way it smells.

It is the same with people. You can tell how touches make one feel from the way they smell. There is either the distinct fragrance of desire or the distinct odour of disdain. Or sometimes the distinct scentlessness of indifference that makes your feel like you have anosmia.

That is the worst of the lot. No stench. No perfume. Just scentlessness.
But it takes a while to know the difference. Nonetheless, it falls. Everywhere.

And sometimes, as it falls, it stirs a storm.

There is a storm in you and there is a storm in me.
You have blizzards that are icy. Cold. They stir broken pieces of glass that cut through the heart, leaving you wounded.

My storms are warm. They stir something soft. Clouds that melt, pour water. Heal.

Your blizzard is what you seek refuge from. Sometimes. My storm is what you seek refuge in. Sometimes.

I don’t know if your storm reflects my soul or your soul is reflected in mine. But there is a storm in you and there is a storm in me. And I hoped, maybe, if you saw the storm in me and I saw the storm in you, we would know some calm in each other. That is why I offered you my storm. So you would find some solace in mine and I would find mine in you. So none of us would have to hide. And both of us, maybe, would begin to heal.

 

these words by Shagufe Hossain were inspired by the work of Chelsea Rushton

“Vancouver to Edmonton, 2017” – Erika Thorkelson

Chelsea Rushton_The Heart's Prayer

We’re driving back to the prairies for your niece’s wedding. Hottest day of the year and the truck’s AC is broken. The mountains are blue ghosts under a gauzy sky. On the radio, the news is bad. Riots in Venezuela, squabbling world leaders, white supremacists. Everyone wants more than they have, even if they already have everything. The air tastes like wildfires and cow manure.

My horoscope says to stay positive, but I don’t buy it. You say you have a headache and my brain sidles into worst-case scenarios—a stroke, a tumour, viral meningitis. To cheer you up, I sing show tunes, but I only know the chorus to “Good Morning” from Singin’ in the Rain.

I’m supposed to be navigating, but I never speak up in time and you never listen. I tell you to take the next exit, but you keep going straight. We have to cross a bridge and do a U-turn to get back on track. A couple hours later, after lukewarm sandwiches under anemic shade trees in Merritt, I ask you to pull over so I can get my bearings, but you’re already turning. Now we’re flying toward Peachland instead of Kamloops.

Peachland. Again!

I tell you to turn around the next chance we get, but the map says we’re locked on the wrong highway for at least 20 minutes. Voluptuous hills with sun-bleached grass rise and fall on either side, offering no shade. The air in the truck gets heavy. It’s pressing on my lungs, my jaw, my shoulders. We sweat in silence, waiting for the other to talk, waiting for the other to apologize.

My horoscope says to stay positive, but I’m with the stoics on this one. Our strength shows not in good times, but in bad. That’s when we learn our hearts are not petals in the wind.

Where we’re going, there will be a beautiful wedding for a young woman who’s already seen more than her fair share of grief. There will be a family who drinks a little too much but only argues over the rules for crokinole. Your dad will be doing okay since he came off chemo and got a better hearing aid. He will hear your voice for the first time in years. It will all be fine, but I don’t know that yet. I’d rather not take any chances.

I swallow and speak first, knowing it’s the best way past this. We’ve been on this road before, I realize; we’ll travel it again. We get better at it every time.

 

these words by Erika Thorkelson were inspired by the work of Chelsea Rushton

“Sammie, Cindy, Hen” – Natalie Morrill

EB_NEHERA_0621

You said you couldn’t remember the time we almost ran away. Do you really not remember? It’s funny how I assume you must. You were about six, I think, and Hen made me think we were going to do it. It was while we still all shared a room. Do you remember that?

There wasn’t much to run away from, you’ll probably say. Our bedroom was pink and musty. We had a dresser drawer full of magazine clippings, mainly boy band members, and also some prayer cards with the pope’s face that one of us had probably stuffed in there while cleaning up. Hen had the wide bunk under mine, and I could slip down the ladder at night and lie spooned with her there if I didn’t wake her. Sometimes I’d find you with her already. I wonder if you remember that.

Your hair was very red back then. I was jealous of you for it and mean about it. You and I were the young ones, to my chagrin, but we pretended a lot together. Whenever Hen pretended with us, the game would become wonderful.

“We are in Arabia,” she told us once, as we made our slow ascent of the staircase, which was a sand dune that day. “We’re riding dromedaries.” I thought it was an animal she’d made up. I imagined something like a Chinese dragon. When my dromedary started to fly Hen said only, “He hasn’t had a drink in days, remember. Don’t let him wear himself out.” So I had him land and plod obediently behind her. It took us three hours to get up that dune.

You were sometimes a little behind in the games. I know we’d take that out on you. You wanted to know the rules but the rules kept changing. Sometimes I changed them on purpose to make you feel small. Sometimes Hen got sick of our smallness and left the game without warning, leaving me bewildered. I’d be cruel to you then, I think.

But I thought I always knew when she was pretending.

• • •

What happened was one afternoon I found her curled in her bed with her face to the wall. I lay down beside her and pressed a hand into her back. She sniffed hard and I understood she’d been crying. It all seemed very real.

She rolled toward me. Her face was very close, her eyes red. She said, “Cindy, we have to run away.”

Now that I write it I realize it was not so simple as I figured afterwards. Then I felt only that I’d failed to understand what was real and what was pretend. It made me feel stupid and little. But I wonder about it now. I think perhaps Mum and Dad had started fighting. Or there may have been something else. I always wondered if there were something else. Maybe you know.

She said, “We have to run away,” and my mouth went dry. I stared at her. I wasn’t altogether opposed to running away, as long as we were running toward something nice, but the seriousness of her face frightened me.

“Where?” I asked.

I don’t think it was the question she’d expected. It’s not the question I’d ask if I could go back and be eight years old again. She swallowed and looked at the ceiling for a minute.

“To the woods,” she said.

This made me feel a bit better. I loved the woods. I liked to imagine living there. The woods were just a block away and we’d built some forts in the bushes already.

I said, “Okay. Tonight?”

“Yes.” She took my hands. “Tonight. Don’t tell anyone.”

“Not even Sammie?”

“We’ll tell Sam. We’ll bring her too. But you can’t tell Mum and Dad. None of your friends.”

I wouldn’t, I promised her. But I was a bit disappointed about bringing you. For a moment it seemed like a wonderful adventure I was going to have with Hen, just the two of us, which was something that never happened anymore.

When I found you I took you to a corner of the den, made you stand right against the wall, and I told you, with hard low words, “We are going to run away.”

I saw you grow frightened, more frightened than I’d been. I thought you might cry and I put a finger under your nose. “Don’t you dare cry, or Hen and I will never speak to you again.”

Everything in me was grim. Everything in you seemed terrified.

“But why?” you asked me.

It was the question I should have asked Hen and I didn’t know the answer. So I said, without thinking, “We’re in serious danger, and everything depends on you being quiet.”

And you were quiet. You watched me all through dinner and hardly ate a thing. Hen stayed up in our room, I think. I don’t remember Mum or Dad saying much at all, but I was stuck in my own head that evening, wondering what would happen next.

Right after we turned the lights off in our bedroom that night, Hen got up and said, “I’ll be in the bathroom.” I watched her disappear, a silhouette cut out of the brightness through our door until it swung shut behind her. I couldn’t remember if this was part of the plan.

“Cindy.” Your voice out of the dark. “What’s happening?”

“Shh.” My heart was thrumming. For reasons I couldn’t guess, I felt sick. I remember thinking faster than I’d ever thought. “We’re supposed to meet her outside.”

“How?”

I said, “We’ll climb out the window.”

It was something I’d often thought about but never done. The trellis reached almost to our window, after all. I got down from my bunk and wrested the sash open.

“You go first, Sammie,” I whispered.

I can’t believe you don’t remember that. I have never felt more outside myself than in that moment. I was pretending as hard as I could, as if believing it fiercely enough could make it real.

Though you were across the room, I could feel somehow your small body tense and shaking in the dark.

“Me?”

“You’re littler. You won’t break the trellis.”

Maybe you forget because it didn’t feel real. For me it didn’t feel real. I was watching a girl tell her sister to climb out the window and wondering what each of them would do.

You came up to the sill beside me. I couldn’t hear you breathing. I put my hand on your back and whispered, “Go, Sammie.”

And you went. Little body out the window like the wind had caught you up in its hands.

I was frozen for a moment, and then I leaned out. “Sam!”

“I’m here,” you said. You were only a voice. “I fell part of the way but I’m okay.”

Which meant, unfathomably, that I had to climb out too. If only that unreal feeling had lasted. Everything was much too real in that moment. But what could I do?

I remember the windowsill rubbing rough against my thighs as I swung my legs out, shaking. The paint must have been flaking off on the outside. I slid down on my stomach, arms stiff as death as I gripped the inside edge of the sill. One of my feet found the trellis and I thought, for a second, that this would be fine. I leaned my weight on it. There came the snap like stepping on a twig in the woods and then I was tumbling through the air.

I landed in a bush. Maybe you’d landed in it first. I remember the moment I realized I was not dead: it was the moment before I realized my ankle was broken.

My screaming brought Mum and Dad out, of course, and Hen. The rest of the night was cars and hospital waiting rooms, delirious cups of hot chocolate sometime around bed at four a.m. In the midst of this, naturally, our parents asked me what had happened, but before I could say anything, Hen told them she’d put us up to it. It was a game, she said. We were pretending to run away. Only she hadn’t realized how seriously her little sisters would take it—she felt sorry, she said, for seeming dishonest. She would be more truthful about our games in the future.

I remember the look on her face when she said it: she was like a medieval penitent, stretched thin by the pull of remorse. So what could I do but believe? I was an idiot; I was a child; I didn’t understand a thing. I fell asleep crying that morning, but only a fraction of it was from the pain in my ankle.

It was very soon after that that Hen convinced Mum and Dad she needed her own room. I don’t think she played with us much afterwards. I’d load you, as my donkey, with a laundry-basket saddle when we climbed the staircase, which was the Grand Canyon, but Hen would be locked in her own little room, doing I don’t know what. And of course not many years after that she left us, suddenly, for good.

• • •

It was kind of you to ask me about this. I’m glad I’ve thought it through and written it down. But I reach this point—and I realize I don’t know if you meant it when you said you couldn’t remember. Write me about it sometime, you said, as we left Mum at the hospital. But you had that look, too—I ought to have learned to notice that look. Did you want me to remember it? Did you want me to tell you my version of things?

I really don’t know anything, Sam. If I could slip down some ladder and cuddle into a warm musty space beside you, and beside our Hen, I suspect there would be less lie in that than anything I could write to you. And I don’t mean that we lie to each other, really. It’s just that the truth is a very hard thing to tell.

 

these words by Natalie Morrill were inspired by the work of Evelyn Bencicova

“City” – Samantha Lapierre

ernte_beute

City, please be gentle with me. Be kind when I close my eyes and the pitch black becomes starry neon lights. Be sympathetic when I ride the streetcar alone, when I fall on the sidewalk and bust my knee open, when I descend wobbly stairs into basement bars illuminated with glowing red lights.

There are streets lined with Internet cafés, shadowy music halls and hole-in-the-walls that all house anonymity. I feel like a very small anonymous blip on your ever-growing radar.

Our necks twist and turn as we leer to recognize a familiar face. We pick fresh fruit from the market stands; cars whiz by and I hear a bicycle bell in the distance. Dead fish rest in storefront windows and people shuffle by. Everybody is hastily going about their own business.

I’ve given you a year of my life, and I’m not sure how much more I have left to give. City, please be gentle with me.

 

these words by Samantha Lapierre were inspired by the work of Olaf Hajek

 

click here for the live audio of our Cagibi reading!

Audio of the first leg of Word and Colour’s Summer Reading Series at Cagibi on June 24th, MC’d by Dena Coffman!


Readers, in order of appearance:

Nailah King, a member of the Room editorial collective. She is also a writer, avid reader, and blogger. A UBC alumnae, she is currently working on completing a thus far untitled manuscript in prose fiction. Read King’s recent word and colour prose, “Diaspora Blues,” inspired by the art of Shanna Strauss

Taisha Cayard, a Social Services student at Dawson College who has recently found interest in writing poetry. She loves to sing and to socialize. Read Cayard’s recent wandc collaboration, “But What Can I Learn From You,” in dialogue with the poetry of Audre Lorde

Lily Chang, who writes, edits, and pays rent and hydro in Montreal. She is a recent graduate of Concordia University’s MA program in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Headlight Anthology, Word and Colour, Voices Visible, and Frog Hollow Press’s City Series. Read Chang’s poetry, “White is Not My Colour,” inspired by the art of Tran Nguyen
wordandcolour
Oumy Dembele, a Professional Theater student from France. A scriptwriting graduate, her writing is mostly focused on fiction and scenes. She recently challenged herself to write prose in English. Her work, “Meiosis,” is forthcoming at Word and Colour.
wordandcolour
Tristen Sutherland, who studies English Literature and Political Science at McGill. When she’s not writing, she’s performing improv comedy or debating whether it’s safe to eat raw cookie dough. Read her recent Word and Colour piece, “Mango,” inspired by the art of Angela Pilgrim.

 

See more photos of the reading via @wordandcolour