The Journey Prize Stories 25 Read Online Free PDF Page A

ceremony, —What’s the city decided for you?
    He looks down at the carpet, which is argyled in an unsettling shade of papaya whip, so that his wig stares me square in the eye.
    —How I envy you, Serge. You don’t have a family to disappoint.
    In the street, a battleship fleet of half-smoked cigarettes floats past my ankles. Though the storm sewers are still overwhelmed, brimmed too full to function, at least, for the moment, things are not getting worse.
    Colette runs to meet me in a tunic dress the colour of otter bone; from a distance, she looks airy, figmental, a forward-floating ghost from some unforgotten past.
    —Hope you haven’t been waiting long, she says, when she is close enough that I can smell cardamom on her breath. —The traffic is hell right now.
    She must see the clouds forming on my forehead because she pauses. Fashions her hands into small canoes and glides the watery channels of my cheeks.
    —Did something happen? she asks.
    —Something happened, I say.
    She takes me by the bulb of the elbow, where my jacket sleeve is patched with grey suede, and steers me across the flooded street. I feel I could float with the tide, lay back and let it move me, like a sprig of sea kelp, like a caravel skimming some long corridor of blue, easily, with the sun as its sentinel.

ANDREW FORBES
IN THE FOOTHILLS
    Marty came down out of the mountains in early March, trailing a string of bad decisions. He started high up in the Rockies and swept into Calgary, coasting at great speed, almost like his brake lines had been cut.
    I was working in a big sporting goods store, selling skis and running shoes and golf clubs. I had been thinking about heading back to Ontario, but that would’ve required putting my tail between my legs, and I wasn’t ready for that just yet.
    He’d been married to my sister for a short time, before she cracked up. My mother still says Eileen’s “taken ill.” Most recently Marty had been in Hundred Mile House, doing I don’t know what, exactly. The details were vague. Before that he’d been in Vancouver. Trouble trailed him like a wake; bad ideas poured off him like a stench. Every time I saw him he was driving a different car. Not new cars, but different ones. This time it was a blue Cavalier with lightning bolts down the sides.
    Since he and Eileen split and she walked herself into an emergency room wearing a nightgown, Marty has drifted likepollen from place to place, his welding papers in his back pocket. He’d stay for a time, use up his luck, then move on to the next town. He’d done like that after he got out of the Air Force at Cold Lake, but then he met Eileen and they had a couple of years where they imitated normal people, settled in one place, rented a nice house east of the city. They stayed in nights. Then real colours began to show through and things went haywire, like I’d felt they would.
    Since then he and I have kept in touch, in a fashion, and all the while I’ve battled feelings of guilt for some sort of disloyalty to my sister. But then again I have since childhood suspected my sister to be the cause of all bad things.
    Marty is big. Not obese, just large, built on a different scale than most human beings. He stands about six-foot-four, and his limbs are like telephone poles. His torso is like the front of a transport truck, and on his feet he wears a size thirteen or fourteen pair of boots. When he drinks, which he often does, it’s usually from something big, a jar or a big plastic travel coffee mug. He drinks vodka mostly, Russians or Screwdrivers. Drinks them like water. Sometimes the only way you can tell he’s on his way down is that his face and neck get beet red. Eventually he just collapses. Finds a bed or a sofa and you can forget about Marty for twelve hours or so.
    The thing with Marty is, when he comes to stay with you, there’s no way of knowing how long he’ll be there. He arrived on a Saturday afternoon and immediately went to sleep on the