Pre-order Suture, forthcoming Fall 2021, now: https://bit.ly/3bfCLxE
Find Suture on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57136856-suture
To make her films, Eva must take out her eyes and use them as batteries. To make her art, Finn must cut open her chest and remove her lungs and heart. To write her novels, Grace must use her blood to power the word processor.
Suture shares three interweaving stories of artists tearing themselves open to make art. Each artist baffles their family, or harms their loved ones, with their necessary sacrifices. Eva’s wife worries about her mental health; Finn’s teenager follows in her footsteps, using forearms bones for drumsticks; Grace’s network constantly worries about the prolific writer’s penchant for self-harm, and the over-use of her vitals for art.
The result is a hyper-real exploration of the cruelties we commit and forgive in ourselves and others. Brewer brings a unique perspective to mental illness while exploring how support systems in relationships—spousal, parental, familial—can be both helpful and damaging.
This exciting debut novel is a highly original meditation on the fractures within us, and the importance of empathy as medicine and glue.
Praise for Suture:
“Suture is a daring, visceral debut that examines the painful side of the creative process. Blending body horror with meditations on love, art, and forgiveness, this novel will startle and captivate you.” —Catriona Wright, author of Difficult People
fiction by Jack Hostrawser | second place fiction winner of the 2017 Blodwyn Memorial Prize, sponsored by Book*Hug
“‘Winnie’ is an exemplary story in all aspects: from characters to pacing to the prose itself—so clear and crisp it is almost transparent. The story drew us in immediately and never let us go. The moment you finish, you want to jump right back up to the start and begin again, and it never fails to hold up under more and more readings.”
It’ll go like this all night, when the snow’s fine like this. I’ve turned the light off in the guest room and slid a chair up to the window to sit and watch until my mom’s ready. Some high-backed thing that’s not very comfortable unless you fold yourself up in it. Everything in Yusuf’s house is like that. People from the forties have weird tastes.
I’ve got a long view from here down to the fields he rents out and all the dry corn still in them, whispering in the snow. If I had the time, maybe I’d go out later all bundled up and go walking in the storm and try to appreciate it. There’s never going to be any snow at Dad’s place.
Mom knocks once then enters, smelling like the fireplace downstairs. “You don’t want the lights on?” she asks, flicking them on. I pick up my backpack of things and she steps out of the way. Yusuf and her are taking his kids on a whirlwind tour of Egypt for three weeks over Christmas break. They’ll spend what some people earn in a year. Mom really wants me to come.
Instead, she says “Your father will really appreciate the company company this time of year.”
The drive in from the hills to the city is slow and warm inside my mother’s new car. The car is noiseless, and when the traffic parts it plummets downhill like a boulder breaking loose. Cities look really nice in snowstorms, before the ploughs clear the roads. I watch the surface streets passing below us like Christmas village scenes of cars stuck on hills and people strolling with their tongues out. As we pull up to the terminal men in suits waiting on the sidewalk look up at this bright red machine crunching through the white streetlight. Mom pays my fare for the shuttle, both ways.
When I was born my parents picked Winnie, after my grandfather (Dad’s side). I never got a good answer as to why they chose that name for their daughter. Winston Liam was a forest-firefighter in Washington and B.C. He worked in the oil sands when the mountains weren’t burning. This was back in the twenties. I was able to find out a lot about him because he posted so much online. The pictures he took on his sorties were actually really good—lots of haze between the trees and predatory, scurrying flames. Family stuff too, but in those he always seemed uncertain. His picture face was to furrow his brow and push up his frown and wait. My dad doesn’t talk about him much.
This is what I figure happened: I think he got blindsided bad a few times, coming home from a season out there in the bush and finding the world changed. He stumbled out of the backcountry smoking or covered in oil and people were asking his opinion about neural interfaces or the businessmen on Mars. And all the while the rains kept failing and his wives kept leaving. I won’t throw stones.
I spot Dad as I squeeze out of the elevator. The terminal always smells like sweat and cleaning solvents. He stands up from the bench and smiles awkwardly at me like we’re sharing a joke. I reach out to hug him with the in-flight magazine still in my hand and I feel his bony ribs under the thin sweater.
“Hello, daughter. How’s the weather?”
“Snowing, father. Don’t you ever look down?”
“Making small talk, Win.”
“Sorry.” I smile for him. “How was your big job on the outside?”
“Long.”
“Yeah but… holy shit. EVA.”
He shrugs, pulls a little box from his pocket. “It’s a little early but… I got you something.”
The wrapping paper is an old invoice. Inside is an acrylic cube the size of a golf ball with a rust-coloured pebble set in the centre.
“Cala at work said some really nice things about, uh, what it means—the significance of the rock, that is.” He takes a deep breath and fake-laughs. “I forgot every goddamned word.”
I twist the glass to pick out the details. It looks like a kidney and is definitely igneous, dull in colour and rough. “Holy shit, Dad. Is this real?”
He’s already walking. “Yep,” he says, “There’s a certificate in the box.” I follow with my eyes on the rock, trying not to trip. Fucking Mars.
“How’s your mother?”
“I dunno. Same. She got her new car.”
He nods and starts leading the way to his apartment. The strip near any of the spokes is all hotels and restaurants. We walk through a movie-set version of the Mediterranean with faux cobblestones and hidden fans pumping in cooking smells. A table of people in nice clothes laughs loudly about something as we pass by the patio, and I catch eye contact with a silver-haired woman in jewelry. Her eyes smile at me, while she finishes telling her story to the table. Through the skylights, the moon spins gently out of view. Once, while my parents were fighting, my mother brought me up here, to the Italian place by B-Spoke, pretending to have money in a terrifying, quiet fever.
At the door to his apartment he lifts his card toward the sensor but stops. “I’m having the, uh…” He stares at his room number where it’s glued to the door, picking at the edge of the card. “I updated the will. But it’s going to take a while, so there’s a document I’ve had them make up. It sort of supersedes what’s—”
“You expecting to die?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think I’m going to die.” He always shrugs when talking about complicated life things. Right now he shrugs and says “You never know.” After a few seconds he smiles a little and says the next thing almost under his breath. “Now, if something happens to me, it won’t all go to your mother.”
I’ve spent evenings with him, watching shitty action movies and trying to keep him occupied enough. Spite’s a new emotion from him. He taps the card and the door unlocks. He puts his jacket on the counter and orders a pizza.
This latest place is about nine hundred square feet, white paint on drywall with recessed lights. Probably not renovated since they built the station. It was a two-bedroom, but one turned into his office. I fold out the couch when I visit, which is fine by me—I slept on a coffee table once at a party, and Dad’s saving money. He really loves making the joke about not quite being able to afford the balcony option yet, and after the first visit I started having this recurring dream of there being a balcony, and a sliding glass door instead of tall windows. I would lean on the railing and watch the sun set over and over behind the curve of the planet. The vacuum smelled like a winter night. In reality, it stinks like ozone. When the cargo ships come in, the docks reek of it.
The dishwasher, I notice, is in pieces on the kitchen floor, parts labeled and a how-to guide printed out. He steps through it and goes into his office to finish work. I open the shutters on the windows and find myself staring down onto wrinkled white tundra, falling slowly away under scattered cirrus clouds. I stare at the floor until the vertigo fades. (The little wooden tiles are the exact shape of Jenga blocks.)
When Dad’s finished I reheat up some slices for him and we watch a movie in the dark, about a man stuck on a hijacked shuttle. The bad guy is trying to distract the authorities while he steals a secret briefcase of money in the cargo hold. People squint and grimace before shooting each other and Dad falls asleep halfway. As the credits roll he inhales and lifts himself out of the armchair, slow as a scuba diver, and walks in stiff steps across the room to the short hallway. The bathroom fan squeaks as it spins up. I’m too jet-lagged to sleep, so I lie awake and browse through articles, looking up to watch the sunset. I fall asleep somewhere in the middle of a feature about famous nuclear weapons accidents.
The first time I went into the hills to eat dinner with my mother at Yusuf’s house she told me the story of her new life: the car, the landscaping, the painting classes at the adult education centre. She served dinner to his daughters and me, and then to Yusuf, telling me there was going to be an allowance.
“You understand, I just never want you to ever feel trapped anywhere. You’re such an amazing young woman and I want you to be free to do the things that matter to you.”
“I guess. I could get a new place of my own.”
“Yes, exactly. Even more than that, though. I want you to think big. It’s so important to travel when you’re young and see the world and not get stuck thinking you have to be one thing or that you have to do a job you hate.”
Yusuf picked up the gravy and poured it onto his duck, looking at me. “Do you have anyplace you’d like to see?”
“I don’t know.”
The three daughters laughed incredulously. “Anywhere in the world?” one asked.
I sipped my wine. “Maybe the Rockies?”
“Oh my God,” my mother said, “yes, you have to see the Rockies. I’m saying you can do that now. Or, when the papers are all signed, but you know what I mean. I want you to really live, Winnie.”
I must have said something nice. I know I picked up a forkful of meat and chewed it, thinking about my own kind of greed. This time last year my mother was drunk in front of the TV while Dad worked in lieu of coming home. But I said nothing and took the money she gave me at the spaceport afterward. The first transfer arrived a week later.
When my dad’s biological mom died last summer he had me sit the house until it sold, and while there I went through her computer. The videos went way back. My favourite is from some camping trip Winston took with three friends after high school, with no idea what they were doing and blackflies in their hair. They’re in canoes, drinking hard and fishing illegally. It looks like they probably don’t expect to hook the huge pike that they do. Winston’s holding the rod and he panics, making his friend panic and that plus the fish’s thrashing almost tips the boat. The guy filming can barely hold up his phone, he’s laughing so hard. The two fishermen somehow get the fish out of the water and then Winston starts beating it with his paddle as hard as he can to make it stop thundering around in the boat. Finally it dies, or passes out, and the two guys just stare at each other for a moment, panting, then they both begin howling with laughter until they can’t breathe. I watched that one over and over. I can’t… I don’t know why.
Dad’s already gone when I wake up on the couch, but he’s left a note saying we’re going out for dinner tonight. I step over all the pieces of dishwasher and make an omelette, which I eat while I try to see how the pieces fit together. He has the parts all labeled in his squared-off handwriting and the littlest bits are taped up in plastic baggies. The trick to repairing stuff is just to fiddle with the pieces until you start finding connections. Yusuf said that. He keeps a yacht in Alexandria, and the first time he took Mom and me down to see it we set out for Cyprus, then broke down. So instead we hung out in the middle of the Mediterranean and stargazed while he crawled below deck, basically learning how to do marine diesel engine repair on the spot. He’s clever like that. At some point in the night he woke me with a bribe of tea to come help him dismantle a water pump so he could fish the broken impeller blades from it. When we had the thing disassembled on the floor he got up and stretched and raised his eyebrows mid-yawn when he noticed the time.
“I started out as a mechanic. Did I tell you that?”
“Mom mentioned it.”
“If you wanted to eat where I grew up you figured something out, and you charged for it.”
“Wow.”
“Can’t be afraid to break things. You just,” he made a chopping motion at the engine with his hand, “try things. Nothing ever fixes itself.” He thought about that for a moment. “Entropy.”
When the pump had a new impeller and the engine was running again, my mother woke up and dragged him off to bed. I climbed up onto the foredeck and stared up at the sky, watching for satellites.
Useful General Notes for Different Dolls, by Emily Sanford
fiction by Emily Sanford | third place winner of the 2017 Blodwyn Memorial Prize in fiction, sponsored by Book*Hug
Combining form, structure, and language—from its narrow margins to its fragmented narrative—’Useful General Notes for Different Dolls’ masters an innovative approach to storytelling that feels like poetry without ever losing its footing as a piece of fiction. Although it provides but a glimpse at its cast, setting, and story, it feels completely whole, and the reader is not left wanting.”
It is essential to observe several rules when sewing doll
figures; flatweave fabric and a sturdy, hard-stuffed body
are crucial. One must use strong fabric with suitable
colour and good hand. Where osnaburg is unavailable,
feed sacking or muslin will stand in good stead.
My grandmother had the correct fabric for flesh—fine
and tight—neatbound stitches, long articulated limbs,
wideblue eyes and tousled hair. The doll had a hospital
gown, knitted lace underwear, a Sunday dress and
matching hat in taffeta. She convalesced in a lidded
breadbasket lined in calico, with the tiniest pillow and
hand-stitched quilt. A modest blush framed her smile—
real rouge on pallid cheeks.
She must have known of the operation weeks before, to
have had time enough to sew the doll. I learned about the
procedure in the tense days just before; my mother
treading the shard-glass line of negotiating contrasting
fears of patient and kin, navigating diagnosis, preparation,
recovery, and the dispatch of details to according bodies.
An emergency nurse, my staid mother was acutely aware
of all risks complications that might arise.
A girl my age was assigned a similar procedure. We played
with the doll together in the hour before being wheeled
into separate theatres. We dressed the doll in the hospital
gown and removed her underwear, as we were instructed
to do ourselves. I never saw the girl again, though asked
about her often. I suspect my mother was protecting me.
One might believe there is little significant difference
between lengthwise and transverse threads in plain
fabric. The length, parallel to selvage, is the direction
the looms are warped when woven; these threads are
taut. The crosswise, or weft, threads are woven over
and under the warp strands and have the tiniest bit of
slack. When pulled across the grain, greater weakness
will happen with wear. It is essential to begin with this
knowledge when constructing durable bodies.
The last moments I spent with my grandmother, she
wasn’t expecting visitors, so reclined in her seersucker
nightie in the overwarm ward. She spoke of my
grandfather visiting her in London on leave from station
in occupied Holland, where he lived with a young family.
They searched the city, hand in hand, for ribbons to give
the family’s two little girls to wear in their hair. She
marvelled with such sadness that there were no ribbons
to be bought in all of London. I hadn’t heard that story
before—nor had my mother, when I recounted it later.
Years after the operation, a school friend stole the doll.
She lived in a fancy house with storebought polyester
drapes; she was often locked out while her mother visited
with a boyfriend. She was instructed to go behind the
shed if she needed the bathroom, where the lilac bush
was thickest so neighbours couldn’t see. She renamed
the doll, and kept her in her underwear drawer. I’m
uncertain where I would keep her if I had her still.
fiction by Leah MacLean-Evans | first place winner of the 2017 Blodwyn Memorial Prize for fiction, sponsored by Book*Hug
“‘Uncle’s News’ is a beautifully small story that revels in the physical details of its scenes, encouraging the reader to feel comfortably nestled within the narrative, within the arms of the uncle in question. The writing—which has as much character as the characters themselves—is intimate, crafting a story that lingers far beyond its quick finish.”
When Uncle came to visit, he was like a couch being moved, rocking his shoulders around the edges of our doors. Uncle was a big man. My father was not a small man, he was six feet tall, but Uncle exceeded him in every direction. I once told a friend that the dwarf in a movie we had just seen looked like Uncle: flannel shirt tucked into bucket pants with no waistline. Suspenders up the back. The dark beard that swallowed up his face. Swallowed up his neck. If Uncle was a dwarf, then next to him my father was a shoemaker’s elf.
Uncle sat in our leather recliner next to the ficus tree and his thighs took up all the space between the arms. The chair squelched around the shape of his back like they were making friends. We didn’t see Uncle often, he had to fly a long time to visit us. He lived in the very Far North and built roads for a living. Once my parents told me that he lived camped in the bush in winter because he had to go wherever the roads were being made. For a long time I imagined him slugged up in a sleeping bag at the black cut-off of an unfinished road, only frozen white scrub ahead.
Uncle always talked very quietly and laughed very loudly. His voice was deep and no matter how small he tried to make it, it carried. His laugh rolled around like marbles in my ears. When he came to visit he laughed at all the jokes, even the bad ones. He never crossed his legs in the leather chair. They came straight down to the ground in front of him, like tree trunks. Even our ficus tree was smaller than Uncle.
One August when I was older, when I was working in the office, we went to see Uncle in the Far North. It was fall and I wore a scarf under my jacket. My brother had to buy a coat at a Walmart, the Walmart parking lot was full of RVs. There are no northern lights in the fall. The sun rose and then it set and there was nothing in the sky except the stars and the moon, but those I could see from home. In the town there was one bistro where they served little salted beans. The beans reminded me of my coworkers then, their health craze, their organic craze. We plucked the beans one by one from the pile and swallowed them. There was another restaurant that only had a building in the front. The back was a tent with heat lamps and picnic tables taped over with plastic. Uncle liked that place, everyone in town called it the meat and fish place, the caribou there was good.
This is the story of Uncle’s life. He was friends with a lady and he thought she was beautiful. The kind of beautiful that makes your lungs ache even when they’re full of air. But this lady was married, so Uncle was friends with her for many years. Finally she divorced her husband and she and Uncle became a couple, they lived in British Columbia then. Uncle had to follow his work and he had come south then. He was happy there until she had a stroke. When she woke up, she thought she was still married to her ex-husband. So Uncle went back to the Far North to follow the roads and she went back to her husband. Eventually she divorced again for the same old reasons, but Uncle was already gone away and neither of them could move.
Uncle never told this to me himself. He told it to my mother who told me. I tried to imagine his deep voice saying it but couldn’t. It sounds like a movie but it is Uncle’s true story.
When Uncle visited, my mother sat near him on the couch and asked him how he was doing. Uncle told us his doctor had x-rayed his back and said he had the spine of a ninety-seven year-old. Uncle laughed as he told us, chuckled. My mother wanted to know what he could do about it, but because his back wasn’t bothering him Uncle’s doctor had said to let it be. It was his twenty years working heavy equipment, and what was Uncle supposed to do, not have money?
I wondered what it was like to have a spine that was fifty years older than you, a rough old rod pulling straight up through yourself. I thought of my job in the office where I did the things no one else wanted to do and the things that didn’t even matter. I thought of the night I didn’t sleep, anxiety boiling in my stomach until it burst warmly out my mouth. Every time I tried to leave the house that week I threw up. Maybe that’s the way it is, I thought. Whatever kind of work you do you break that part of yourself.
fiction by Sara Flemington | third-place winner of the 2016 Blodwyn Memorial Prize in fiction, sponsored by Book*Hug
We were suddenly on a lucky streak. Following a very long, very unlucky streak. For example, the movies. Four bad movies in a row. And you being the type of person who could tell right away if a movie was going to suck or not, and me being the type who was clairvoyant enough to start panicking as early as the concession if it seemed like I’d taken someone out to a sucky movie, it was an all around uncomfortable series of unfortunately campy and “ha-ha” date nights. Then, there was X. Popping up everywhere: drugstore aisles, bars, the post office. And you being nice enough to always say hi, and me being nice enough to not comment on how her smile made her look like she was teething, or ask the reason as to why she was regularly done-up as if about to hit Prom ’85, we always had to stop and have a quaint little chit-chat about her newest accomplishments — arts-grants-wise — or about the tragic passing of Dear Aunt Beatrice, who was nothing if not her biggest source of moral support and guidance, as the lesbian of the family, and therefore, the only other dissenter. And on top of all that, the cactuses died. For no reason, as if by suicide to get away from the doomed home they had recently been moved into. And so I was pretty certain that, Mercury retrograde aside, I had become a jinx for you and our love would never be allowed its proper chance to sprout, let alone effloresce, (remember that homemade haircut I tried to give you ultimately resulting in a entire shaving of the head?) and in very little time you would, in turn, begin to despise me and wish we had never met and hope that somehow, in some life, you might find your way back to the inflatable tube man arms of X.
And then, Christmas came. But not in the It’s a Wonderful Life sense of the holiday, where we both would learn the power of a positive outlook; more like, in the holiday-packs-of-scratch-tickets sense. Because we were sitting beside each other at the very back of the very last bus of the night, heading home from drinking far too much acrid red wine at a disappointing poetry reading held at the “recently renovated” i.e. recently primer-painted community art gallery, and the heat was cranked far too high for our winter jackets and toques and scarves so we were both uncomfortably sweating through the crevices of our armpits and nostrils, and the reddish + greenish hue our skin had adopted from the alcohol + overhead bus lighting was making us appear even more dismal than we already naturally did. And that’s when I spotted them, jammed between the two seats directly across from us: the shimmering, unopened stack of lottery cards. Of course, it took a while for one of us to get up and “just take them,” being overly anxious over-thinkers plus regular sufferers of mental inertia, but finally, seconds from our stop, I threw my arms up as high as they could go in a puffy winter jacket + two more layers of sweaters and declared, “It’s not like they’re gonna be winners anyway,” and tucked them into purse. Then we stepped off the bus into the refreshingly frozen night.
But I was wrong. Ten dollars. That’s what we won. And Jupiter was about to make its move through Cancer.
“Can you believe it?” I said to you — sincerely, actually. “Can you believe we just happened upon these tickets? And now we have enough to buy like, four more bus rides? That’s like, two bus rides each.”
And you with your ever-salient shrug replied, “Happened upon? Really?”
Regardless, that was just the start. Because then, along came the cat.
“How is the cat good luck?” you argued. “He’s disgusting and annoying and he gets litter everywhere. And I’m pretty sure he’s slow. Like slow slow. Watch his eyes.”
“But, re-examine the point,” I begged. “So I was just walking along, like normal, like I always am, and right there in the window, there’s this little guy! Fresh off the streets, all shaking and on-sale and with a weird squinty eye. Look, it looks like he’s winking. Which is just like how you described your beloved childhood cat that only just two nights ago you had come across an old picture of and went on and on about how much you missed so much, which led right into a conversation about adopting our own little kitten –”
“Maybe adopting our own little kitten.”
“Maybe adopting our own little kitten. But anyway, here he is, and it was clearly meant to be.” And even though, granted, this particular kitty was a bit off somehow, he did serve to prove my point that good, possibly even great things, were now on the horizon for us. You still didn’t believe me at this point, but you had, at least, learned to love to humour me, and also learned to love the oddly vacant cat, while I was taking a daily inventory of signs from the universe divining our good fortune:
Your favourite hat — lost two months prior — resurfaced, magically, while I was cleaning out the refrigerator.
The day every single item written down on our grocery list was on sale at the grocery store.
The cookie thing (when the second cookie got stuck to the one we bought to share, but the lady behind the counter didn’t notice, so basically we just got a free cookie, which was mostly good for you because then I wouldn’t eat two thirds of the first one after claiming I only wanted a single chocolate chip and leaving you with basically nothing).
The second chance you gave me at giving you a haircut, and it turned out to be a pretty spot-on attempt modelled after a picture of Ryan Gosling.
The discovery that we had, at one point, attended the same film screening in Toronto, on the same day, years before ever meeting in real life.
The discovery that we had ALSO been at the same concert for one of our mutually favourite bands, in Toronto, on the same night, ALSO before ever meeting in real life.
The lucid dream I swear we shared.
“Maybe you’re right, like, maybe we’re soul mates or something,” you said one day, petting the winking feline and, joking or not, I continued to discover more coincidences to add to the inventory; a rare 1979 Boba Fett Loose Action Figure with Original Back Blaster for pennies in a bin of kids books at Goodwill; the big power outage and thus free popsicles from the convenience store the same night I found some old weed in the bookcase; the twenty bucks in the building’s dryer. Even kitty seemed to be getting a little bit smarter, not batting his turds out of the litter box so often. And with the new moon beginning to wax, everything in both of our entire lives began to feel like it was not only coming together to complete a circle in which we would inevitably end up in the centre of — deeply happy and entirely X-less — but a sphere. Like we existed in some sphere type thing, like a planet, like our own planet following its own orbital path. Or fate. Or something.
“You’re losing your mind,” you said to me, combing your fingers through my hair one night as we lay across the couch watching yet another good movie. Maybe, baby, maybe. But maybe, I wasn’t, actually. Because then, as it often happens when things are going well, I started to wonder when it all might start to go wrong again; you know, when karma would decide it was time to balance things out. It was turning into spring, and while everyone around us was getting cheerier and everything around us was getting colourful and good-smelling, I was becoming paranoid that at any moment you’d be calling me at work in the throes of a severe allergy attack, or the hospital would be calling me with news of your newly broken legs due to a bicycle accident (knock on wood), and I continued to I waver consistently between calm and vomit-mode. But these grand fears never materialized. What did end up materializing was the bagel you burned one sunny morning resulting in the whole apartment smelling like singed sesame seeds.
“That’s a thing,” I said.
“It’s not a thing if I don’t even care,” you replied.
And I guess I kind of liked the smell.
So while I was out, walking along again, like I always did, I decided to take a chance and step inside the floral boutique I usually passed by but of course, never went inside of anymore. I meekly approached the thin young florist with a swoopy haircut and very well-ripped jeans who was tying white ribbons around lilac bouquets, and asked:
“Excuse me, I was just wondering, which plant would be relatively easy to maintain and, maybe doesn’t require much extra care and maybe, you know, could be left alone for an extended period of time or even accidentally forgotten about and still be okay afterward?”
And whose shrill snort should I hear pipe up right behind me, followed by her sudden eagerness to show off all of the green-thumb knowledge she had apparently accumulated over her many years of being perfect at everything, but X. Our lovely lanky phantom X.
“A cactus?” she laughed, and began in on how she used to raise orchids, nurse Venus flytraps, shape bamboo stalks into elaborate spirals and hearts and I could feel the acid reflux pushing up my trachea and clogging my nasal cavity. Sensing my panic, the florist stepped out from behind the counter, linked his arm through mine like a best girlfriend, and directed us safely away from X and towards the corner of the room, where the moderate moisture-loving shade-dwellers were kept.
“I think you’ll do just fine with one of these,” he said. I pocketed the laminated fertilization instructions.
And that was the day I brought home the spider plant. I set it down in the middle of the kitchen table with a dramatic thud, and I stood there and looked you in the eye and I made a promise. I promised that I would keep the damn thing pretty and green as long as I lived in this damn apartment with you, so help me dammit, and I may never be able to cultivate a banana plant or whatever, and even if we wake up one day to a flood or a fire or full body rashes or something, or Mars and Saturn and Pluto all simultaneously backspin right through both of our signs at the same time, I will still be here, keeping everything pretty and green and alive, for you, and for that weird cat over there, and for this plant, and that was about the point when I started to run out of breath, and kind of doubled over a bit, and realized how comforting it felt to know that while I was there, one hand on my chest and one hand stroking the long pointy leaves of our newest addition, you were looking at me with that composed smile.
fiction by Rudrapriya Rathore | runner-up for the 2016 Blodwyn Memorial Prize in fiction, sponsored by Book*Hug
Near the end of the year, the toll-free number flashes across my phone three, five, seven times a day. There’s an odd rhythm about it that orders everything I do. A buzz on the morning subway ride where the train surfaces long enough to get phone signal, like a metallic dolphin mid-leap. A buzz during my lunch break while I eat my cucumber-cheese sandwich at the receptionist’s desk. A buzz when I walk to the grocery store in the evening, or if it’s Friday, to the Owl to get a drink with Phil. And when I get home after dark, two or three more while I watch TV in bed, the phone lighting up my covers with its bluish glow.
I never pick it up.
“Why not?” asks Phil, sucking down his weekly dose of pub fries while they’re still hot.
“Why should I? It’s just a telemarketer.”
“You don’t know that.” We’re more than a year deep into Owl Fridays and the waitresses know us so well they give us the same window table every time. Phil likes the curvy girl with the ponytail, though he’d never admit it, and gives his usual order trying not to look at her chest.
“Who else would call me this many times? It’s a machine, I bet. Not even a real telemarketer.”
“What if it’s your bank?” He licks the salt off his fingers.
“It’s not my bank. My bank emails me.”
“It could be your insurance company, or your internet.” He glugs his beer. “What if it’s the government or something? CSIS?” We look at each other for a moment, thinking it through. Then he snorts into his pint and I laugh because he’s dripping on his shirt collar.
“Alright, I get it. I’m too boring for CSIS.”
“That’s true. You haven’t even had two beers in a row since college.” Phil wipes his face. He likes this. If I play along for long enough, he slips his arm around me on the walk back to the subway station. Once in a long while, he comes home with me. We have sex for half an hour and then he calls a cab, waving as it pulls up to the curb.
This began when I got the job at the reception desk. Phil’s a manager in the office, I think, or an agent. A buyer. A seller. They’re all something like that, the ten or twenty men and women that pass by me every day on their way to the coffee machine. They look the same: blandly content, middle class. They say the same things on a weekly rotation. Hump Day! Happy Friday! Nearly the weekend now! Ah, Mondays! Sometimes I play a game where I try and beat them to it. “Almost Friday!” I say as Marie turns the corner, her glossy pink lips just opening up to greet me. She pauses. I think I see a flash of irritation move across her face—or maybe it’s just a ripple in the sea of foundation-powder blush. “That’s right!” she replies, heels clicking by.
“If I’m boring, what are your colleagues?” I ask Phil.
He shakes his head and gets up to pay. “You should pick up the call. See who it is.”
The phone buzzes two more times that night, and each time, as I lay there in my pajamas watching TV, I look over hoping it’s Phil. CSIS agent here, Ma’am. We’re concerned about the dullness of your daily routine. He might say that, if he called. That sounds like him.
I think of calling him, but I can’t make myself do it, can’t imagine what I would say. That kind of spontaneity belongs to a different kind of person. Those people regularly surprise themselves with what they come up with. They find a new version of themselves in every phone call, while I agonize over how to sign off in work emails. Sometimes I sent documents I needed for the next day in emails to myself. I watched them leave and then land in my inbox, a virtual boomerang. Each one pinged, Look! It’s you!
But the toll-free calls were different. I liked knowing that someone or something had logged my number. There was an entity on the other end of the line, and it wanted something from me.
I roll over and turn off the TV show. It’s almost eleven o’clock. If I did call Phil, he might not answer. That would be the best scenario, I think, if he sat in the dark, too, watching the phone buzz, liking the feeling of being wanted.
***
Either the next day or the next week, I get a voicemail. I stare at it with my eyebrows furrowed over my cucumber sandwich before opening it. I almost want to walk to Phil’s office so we can listen to it together, but I don’t. It’s been so long since I listened to a voicemail that it takes me five tries to remember my password, and when I finally get it right, the perky automated voice sounds a lot like Marie. I listen hard, but the message is just silence. Not dead air, exactly, but a kind of quiet hum. When I listen the second time I think I can hear a slight shuffle. Clothes, maybe, rustling against each other.
I tell Phil later, when he walks by to get coffee, and he says, “That’s weird.”
“I know.”
“Pick it up! Next time. I’m telling you.” He raises his eyebrows for emphasis.
That day I get home and tip over the potted plant on my windowsill while doing dishes. It spills fresh, black soil into the clean dishes on the counter, so I have to wash them all over again. Afterwards, I fix the plant and realize the windowsill’s dirty, so I clean that too, and it gets me on a roll, scrubbing the counters and the floors and the walls of the kitchen, where dirt has been secretly accumulating without my noticing. The top of the fridge where I keep the cereal boxes. The crack of space between the stove unit and the cupboards. I clean until my knees hurt and my nostrils burn from the soap and bleach, and then I listen to the silent message saved on my phone again, this time with earphones, so I can turn it all the way up. The shuffle is still there, hiding under a hum. Something human that does not speak.
It starts happening all the time. My voice mailbox fills up every two days, the mechanical-Marie alerting me loudly every time I punch in my password. The messages are always nearly silent, but one in every ten or so sounds slightly different. There’s a muted, tinny beeping through one of them. A sound that could be breathing, if you listen a certain way. A buzz like an air conditioner.
One night, I make a spreadsheet so I know how often the noises happen and colour-code it according to the time of day. I type the number into a search engine, but nothing comes up. I even search company directories online, trying to trace it to a corporation. Another night, I dream that something is watching me through the small camera lens on my phone, so I stick a little piece of green tape over it when I wake up.
Phil passes by my desk three or four times a day and we exchange nods. Friday at the Owl, he leaves early, after only one drink, so I go home and scroll through the spreadsheet, waiting for the phone to ring so I can make another entry. According to the numbers, I’ve been receiving more calls since that first voice message. It’s no longer three, five, seven times a day but thirteen, fifteen, seventeen. I cross-reference columns, trying to find a pattern, but there’s nothing there except for the fact that I never get the good voicemails, the human ones, more than once or twice a day.
It should be scary. I know this. It should make me feel anxious, like I’m under surveillance. But it makes work bearable, to have that phone constantly buzzing in my pocket where no one else can hear it. I suddenly like seeing Marie, because she doesn’t know that she sounds like the automated voicemail lady who greets me so fondly, and I wonder in my daydreams at the desk if Phil is actually the one making the calls, because maybe he doesn’t know how else to tell me he loves me.
My mother calls. I hear another call go through while she tells me about her new yoga class, and my hands shiver a little while I think about the new voicemail. She asks me if I’m dating anyone, and it slips out of my mouth: Yes, I am—actually, he’s here, I have to go. But of course she asks who, and I tell her, A man in my office, we get along great, it’s been a couple of months now.
“Well, well,” she says in a tone of voice that suggests she finds this difficult to believe, “What’s his name?”
Another call starts on the other line and my palms grow clammy. “Phi-Patrick.”
“What?” I resist the urge to hang up on her.
“Patrick,” I repeat. Maybe the voicemails have sharpened my ears somehow, because I can hear something that sounds just like if she was sucking on a cigarette. She hasn’t smoked since before I was born, though, and I refuse to ask her.
“It sounds like things are really looking up for you, darling. I couldn’t be happier. Just a little while ago you were telling me how bored you were, and terrified of never getting married. Is this Patrick—I mean, is he serious about you?”
My hand lowers the phone from my ear. There’s a translucent smear of sweat and beige makeup on the screen. Feeling as though my face is breaking down and sliding off me in wet little puddles, I half-cover the bottom half of the phone and call out to my empty kitchen, Patrick, hon, are you serious about me? and giggle.
“He says he’s not quite sure yet,” I say to her, laughing.
She laughs too. I hang up and wash my face.
***
I love it when Phil is nervous. This I realize at James’s retirement party, which I attend in a blue dress that makes my legs look longer than they really are. A big frosted cake has been ordered from the bakery in honour of James, his name piped over it in green and yellow, and a card that says, Now Real Life Can Begin! has been signed by everyone regardless of whether they spoke to James or not.
Phil gives a speech. It’s not clear to me why he is the one giving the speech instead of one of James’s friends. Maybe he is a bigger manager or agent or buyer or seller than I thought. He hands out glasses of champagne in the lunchroom and then takes a few index cards out of his pocket. He reads off them a few things about how lucky we have all been to benefit from the great attitude James brought into the office, and makes a joke about how some people think not working means being less tired, but others think it means being re-tired, tired again. Then he begins to talk about how much we’ll miss him. He must have copied the cards out wrong, because he reads the same one twice. He knows, too, but is too embarrassed to stop, and remains blotchy for minutes after everyone has toasted James and begun to chat again.
I watch from across the room, near the doorway, and he catches my eye and smiles. I gesture to him with my glass and point out the door, trying to ask if he wants to grab a drink later, but he shrugs and begins talking to someone.
Later on, at home, I watch the phone ring. For reassurance, I print off a copy of the spreadsheet, all eighty pages of it, and lay on my impeccably clean bedroom floor listening to the hum of the printer. I remember my favourite voicemails—the breathing, the definitely human shuffle. There will be someone, I tell myself, who can explain this to me. I smooth my hair and tuck it behind my ears before beginning to read over the notes on the spreadsheet again.
fiction by Amy LeBlanc | second-place winner of the 2016 Blodwyn Memorial Prize in fiction, sponsored by Book*Hug
eight: what are you looking forward to?
I stand at the edge of the barn and watch the oak tree go up first. From where I’m standing, it looks like the tree is spitting its leaves, trying to save them from the wreckage. The trunk splits down its center, shuddering more leaves out into the air. Fall is a beautiful time for it all to burn. The fire spreads. The tendrils of smoke drift across the field and latch onto the siding of the farmhouse. Not long now. There are no more footprints lining the way from the oak tree to the farm, but now oak leaves litter the ground and the low riding smoke snakes between the two. I try to clean my hands, but the gasoline spreads across my palms and seeps into the fine lines. It pools under my fingernails and I hear the crackle of our radio from inside. A news report about colour blindness, I think. I think about what Grandma used to say as I watch the tree shudder in the smoke. We don’t know what it’s like to be the ocean.
one: what do you think brings you here?
Grandpa says the people in this town honk their horns to talk to each other; one short honk to say hello, three times to warn that police are down the road with breathalyzers, and one long for when the hockey team wins. Grandpa says we should honk our horn when we turn the blind corner just before the farm; that way whatever’s on the other side knows we’re there. Grandpa says you don’t want to miss something just because you didn’t listen. Grandpa says if you see a kid on a bike honking their plastic, clown horn, you better smile at them, too. Grandpa says they might squint at you from under the visors of their helmets, and you’ll remember when your muscles were loose and lanky like theirs. Grandpa says never forget that. Grandpa holds the horn down the whole time he rounds the corner. Grandpa doesn’t slow down, because he has flowers in the trunk and wants to get home to us as fast as he can.
two: what is the problem from your viewpoint?
Grandpa sweeps his hands across the maple tabletop and sends the funeral home forms floating down onto the linoleum. I think he wanted them to fall faster, like pots and pans might have. He wanted them to crash and dent the floor, but they just float down until they coat the floorboards like petals. I think he wanted Grandma to be cremated here at the farm, but the funeral home won’t let him. I don’t want him to know that I saw him throw the paperwork; I keep my eyes just above my Maya Angelou book. I used to close my right eye and walk around the house to see what Grandpa saw when he walked. He told me what he has is called Glaucoma and there was nothing we can do about it. I found the word in my science books and saw we could fix it if we went to the doctor fast enough. It wouldn’t go away, but we could make it better for him. When I told Grandpa, he said like hell I’m going to the doctor. know what they’ll do to me? they’ll take it out. i’d rather have a bad eye in my head than a bad eye floating in a jar. All I could picture after that was an eyeball floating in the center of a jar and Grandpa walking around with a hole in his head like an open mouth that never spoke. He rakes the forms up off the floor and walks out the door. I run to the window to watch him leave. The cat follows him out the door, and they leave two pairs of footprints in the snow. Grandpa’s footprints are straight and evenly spaced but the cat’s footprints snake around his like smoke tendrils.
three: what makes the problem better?
We had to burn the cat. Grandpa was turning the blind corner and didn’t see her in time to stop. He honked as he turned, but the cat didn’t move. The screen door creaked, and he came in with a brown lump in his arms. He carried her the same way he carried firewood; her straight body leaned against his arm and shoulder. Grandpa settled her down, packed her in hay, poured the gasoline and lit the match. My eyes watered with familiar heat and it all sounded like crackling leaves. We had just lost the chickens and their ashes were still dissipating. The smell coated my nose and wouldn’t leave, no matter how many times I blew into Grandma’s handkerchief trimmed with violets. I kept expecting to see it coated in black when I pulled it from my face.
four: and how does that make you feel?
I reach my hand into my pocket to feel for the metal angel that Grandma gave me. I feel its weight in my palm and trace the pressed angel’s shape with my fingertip. She kept it in her change purse and almost mistook it for a quarter a few times when she went to the store. I had to tug on the hem of her skirt to get her notice her mistake. Tugging on her skirt released a puff of old cigarette smoke smell from the fabric. I liked to think that I could associate a time and place with each iteration of smoke. It could have been from her cigarette, sitting at the back of my school gymnasium for the spelling bee. Or it could have been the smoke bouncing off the closed car windows when Grandpa was driving us home. It could have been the smoke dispersed when she took her scarf off at the front door. She used to say that she hated the smell of old cigarette smoke. I never understood why. Instead, Grandma loved the smell of gasoline. She kept her handkerchief tucked into her sleeve and sometimes loose tissues, too. I used to follow behind her, picking up the ones that dropped to the ground. I followed her trail of tissues and smoke.
five: how are you sleeping?
Grandpa asked me to crack eggs for dinner. We’d been buying eggs from the store since the chickens died. He handed me six eggs from the carton that creaked when he pushed the tabs back into place. Grandpa’s hands were big enough that he could hold four eggs in each hand. I took one egg and cracked it against the side of the chipped glass bowl. I half-cracked the egg, creating little rifts in the white shell and then had to peel bits of the membrane back to fully open it. The yoke hung in the center of the bowl, swimming in the rest of the egg white. I reached for the next egg when I noticed a spot in the bowl. A red smear like string clung to the yoke’s center. My stomach turned and I cupped my mouth with one hand and pushed the bowl across the table with the other. Grandpa noticed. it’s just a little blood. come on, you won’t even taste it once it’s cooked. Grandpa took the bowl to his side of the table and mixed the egg with a whisk. The red stretched into a thin strand pulled taut, then finally yielded, breaking apart and dissipating into the rest of the egg. I closed my eyes and waited for my stomach to turn itself right side up.
six: when did you start feeling unwell?
I keep the cat’s ashes in a box under the kitchen sink. I haven’t decided where to scatter them yet. She liked to watch birds under the oak tree; maybe I’ll scatter them there. I used to go down to the oak tree with Grandma. Grandpa had gone into the city and we were going to have a picnic. She held a basket of apples in one of her hands and my hand in her other. Halfway down the hill she took her hand from mine to cough into her handkerchief. She tried to tuck it back into her sleeve before I could see, but it was covered in red strings, each one wrapping around the violets, crystalline, like a mosaic.
seven: do you ever feel ashamed?
There was a girl named Jubilee who lived down the road from us. I told her that Grandpa died too, and she told me that everything happens for a reason. She said that her dad died in a motorcycle crash and that it was her fault. She said it happened because she’d lied to her mom about the cigarettes she’d stolen from her purse. She said my cat and my grandparents died because my mom and dad weren’t married when they had me. Her voice was gentle and lilting, which made me think that she really believed this. I took one of Grandma’s cigarettes out of my pocket, put it between my lips and left Jubilee making crop circles in the red gravel with the tips of her shoes. I walked back to the farm, and laid Grandma’s violet-trimmed handkerchief on Grandpa’s chest. I’m starting to understand why Grandma loved the smell of gasoline.
The First Time I Ever Used the Path, by Charlotte Van Ryn
fiction by Charlotte Van Ryn | winner of the 2016 Blodwyn Memorial Prize in fiction, sponsored by Book*Hug
I asked him if he’d ever killed anybody; he said focus Charley. I told him everything I knew, told it to him straight. He was probably using mind-reading technologies, so I knew I couldn’t tell him the slightest of white lies like I usually do. Which is too bad because I’m the sneakiest liar in all of White Oak.
Did you know her? he asked.
Yes I said, in a sort of sneaky way I knew her.
How do you mean? he asked.
She lives in the middle of the forest where I do my finest lurking, I said. I live on the edge of town, so I have the whole forest to myself except for Mrs. Williams. Her cottage has a yard and a dirt path, but I am an adventurer so I don’t use paths.
Did she know you were spying on her? Did you ever talk to her? he asked.
No and no I said.
What was she doing when you spied on her? he asked. Well, I said, she was like an animal. Sometimes she was doing boring things, sometimes she was doing wild things. I don’t understand much of what she does. She moved like an animal, like she was always scared of something — I don’t know from what because she is a human and we are on the top of the food chain — but she was always waiting for something to come out of the trees.
Sometimes she would garden but when she did she would always pause and look up. Sometimes it looked like she forgot what she was doing and would stop. Sometimes she would come out and rip all of the plants out of the garden and chuck them across the lawn. Her eyes were always shiny. She’d make tea every day and when the weather was good she would sit on her porch with it, but I never once saw her take a sip. She would stare into the forest; she wasn’t looking at me, she wasn’t looking at anything. Most of the time her mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear any sound come out. Usually she’d toss her tea into the flowers. I understood her in some way though. We are both hybrids of the animal kingdom, that’s why I watched over her.
Did you ever speak to her? he asked.
I had nothing to say, I said. I was her silent protector.
But you watched her a lot? he said.
Yes, all the time, I said, almost every day when school got let out. Every day except for Sundays, which is always church and chores and church and chores and church.
Did you ever go into her house? he said.
No, I never got too close because my cover would be blown, you know. There is a tree lying on its back by the lawn, that was my hiding spot. It was my best job. I’ve been watching her for months really, ever since she moved in.
Do you know why she moved into the cabin? he said.
Duh I said, everyone knows that. She used to live in the town beside the hardware store. Mr. Williams moved away when their daughter Aurelia died. I knew Aurelia sort of. She was in the big school, I’m still in the small school. I think I liked her because of puberty. Anyways I never talked to her.
So, he said, writing on his notepad, probably a special issued secret decoder notepad, tell me what happened to you today, from the time you woke up until now.
Are you in the FBI? I asked.
No Charley I’m not, he said — but I knew he was lying.
I woke up earlier than my parents, just like every other Saturday. I did my stretches and changed into the army pants Uncle Gabe got me from New York. I went into the kitchen and found that Mom had got the hot dogs I wanted, they were in the freezer. So obviously the day was going pretty well so far. I ate one frozen and put two more in the side pocket of my pants, it’s the only one with buttons — I move around a lot and need them to be secure. I put my boots on and a t-shirt and was in the forest quick. There are lots of terrible, dangerous things in that forest, that’s why I have to go in every day. Nobody goes in there, that’s why they don’t believe me when I tell them all about the battles I’ve won. I can’t believe Mrs. Williams can live right in the forest every day, it’s scary. I would never go there at night. I’m scared even in the day time but I have to be brave.
I went to the cooked chicken tree and kicked it for a while. I call it that ’cause it’s rotting and when you kick at it the chunks come off like a quarter chicken dinner. Branches and bushes were scratching my ankles; my army pants are too short now because of puberty and my long socks were in the wash. Close to the blueberry patch, I started to smell something strong and different. I heard cracking sticks or something larger. All of a sudden I was a dog. I was sniffing everything and getting closer to where the smell was coming from. Soon enough I could see smoke, even though I was a dog and eyesight is my weakest sense, I couldn’t help but see smoke was everywhere. I leaped over branches with my nose in the air. I ran and ran towards Mrs. Williams’s cabin, using my tail for balance.
When I first saw the fire spilling out a window I wasn’t a dog anymore. I waited at my usual stump, watching the flames curve out from the far side and up onto the roof. They were mean and roaring and quickly ripping through the wall of the house. I smelled roast beef — which I thought was strange — then I remembered Mrs. Williams.
This was the first time in my whole life I went into the clearing, stepping from outside of the forest. I got as close as I could and looked into one of the windows where the fire hadn’t reached yet. I could see now that it was the kitchen that was burning up, but closer to me was the living room. There she was, lying on the couch.
I paused from my story and looked at the secret agent.
Don’t tell Mom this part, ok? I said.
Ok, he said.
I mean it, I said, I know I’m a kid but don’t be tricky.
Scouts’ honour, he said. At that moment I knew he was true.
I ran in the door and over to Mrs. Williams. The smoke was so thick I coughed and my head felt wobbly straight away. The side of my face nearest to the kitchen was burning hot. I squinted my eyes and found her body laying still. I tried to lift her but she was heavy, she’s a small woman but still a grown-up. I’m sure she had rocks in her pockets. I grabbed her wrists and dragged her off the couch, across the living room and out of the door getting her dress dirty on the ashes that had blown over. I was walking backwards which was pretty tough. When we were on the grass I fell back coughing. I lay there listening to the crackle of the wood breaking up.
Mrs. Williams was not moving, but I could see her chest go up and down. It was just a matter of time before she woke up again. Then I got nervous; I wouldn’t know what to say when she woke up. I’d never talked to her. I thought maybe she will be hungry, so I grabbed the two hot dogs from my pocket. They would taste better roasted of course but I didn’t have time. Mrs. Williams gasped and propped herself up on her elbows and looked around. She saw me, and then turned her head to the burning house.
I looked back at her. I should have told her that I had hot dogs if she was hungry. She got to her feet with tears in her eyes and ran back into the house, closing the door behind her. I looked through the window but there was so much smoke I couldn’t see anything. I heard her coughing but then it stopped. I didn’t know what to do. I had seen a beetle once walk straight into a campfire — no survival instincts — but she was better than a beetle. It started to get really hot so I held the hot dogs tight ran with one in each hand. I used the path for the first time, taking the road all the way into town. Behind me I could hear a crash, wood snapping and the tin roof shaking like thunder as it fell.
When I got into town I went straight to the comic shop because Burt, the owner, is the only one there I can talk to.
Hey nature boy, Burt said.
Cut it out, I said.
Why do you have hot dogs in your hands? he said.
Because Mrs. Williams’s house is on fire, I said.
Stop making things up, he said.
I yelled to him that it was true. For the first time he brought himself from the colourful pages to really look at me. I was covered in smoke. He ran to the telephone and called the police. I ate the hot dog in my left hand while I waited for them to show up. It was still a little bit frozen. I was still hungry but saved the second one for Mrs. Williams. Then you came in, Mr. FBI.
The agent looked scared like a kid.
I know you don’t believe me, I said. It’s ok, people never believe me, I said. Then his phone rang and he got up, pacing around. He had given me a blanket but I brushed it off. I wasn’t cold, if anything I was boiling. He lowered his head and hung up the phone. He came back over and sat beside me, putting his hand on my shoulder.
He offered me a ride home. I said no thanks, I knew how to get back on my own.
No, he said, I want to take you. I could only see some of the sky through the window of the backseat. I ate the second hot dog.
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado (an amazing collection of short stories that uses the surreal and supernatural to examine trauma)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle and the collection Let Me Tell You, Shirley Jackson
Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier (Our Shared Shelf book choice!)
The Lovecraft Compendium, HP Lovecraft
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Most of these are in my to-read stack! I’ve only read Uzumaki and Machado’s collection of stories, because I only recently started loving Halloween and spook. What are your favourite spooky season reads?
Welcome to the Sad Girls Book Club, and the book that started it. There should be an “about” page going up soon, but for now I’ll share a little introduction. The Sad Girls Book Club is not just for girls and not just for sad people, but it is for people who know how it feels to be sad and who like to use books to survive. Right now it’s just me, and a bunch of books I’ve read over the past several years – posts I’ll be queuing up with a few sentences about why this belongs in the Sad Girls Book Club reading list.
For me, this book was the original Sad Girl book. It remains unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I recommend reading my whole little review here, if you’re interested.
If you are, like me, a fellow half-formed thing slowly building up the rest of you, if you know what it is to be half-formed and propelled by dreams and terror, then this book will be awful. But it is a form of solidarity I’ve never encountered before, gut-wrenching, painstaking.
We’re getting crafty with our book date, Handmade Houseplants by Corrie Beth Hogg. Here’s what it’s about:
Handmade Houseplants offers a no-water option for your urban jungle: plants made from paper! This stylish guide includes step-by-step instructions and templates for making 30 of the most popular houseplants, from monstera to fiddle leaf fig. Additional projects show how to use paper plants for home décor, wall art, holiday decorations, gift giving, and more. The projects are simple enough to be made in few hours, and the materials are affordable and easy to find. Packed with colorful photos and filled with inspiration, Handmade Houseplants shows how paper plants can provide a modern, light-hearted touch to a well-designed home.
The first independent book shop has just opened in my town! It specialises in fantasy, sci fi and horror and you can guarantee I will be there all the time
Word on the Water, London, a 1920s barge that has been made into a bookshop. It used to travel along Regent’s Canal, but is now permanently moored by Granary Square in King’s Cross.
