The Journey Prize Stories 24 by Various

Author:Various [Authors, Various]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-9587-0
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2012-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

TWO

“You’re the preacher’s girl,” the older boy said. He wore jeans and a black beater, and he tied his bandana like a pirate.

“He’s my uncle.” Natalie lay stomach-down on a picnic table. She flicked the cedar bark top she’d found that morning, and it spun out from her fingers until the nose dipped into a crack between table planks.

“So you’re going to the potlatch tomorrow? They always invite your uncle.”

“It’ll be my first.”

The older boy carried an empty margarine bucket. He squatted between the peonies in the centre of the church flowerbed and sifted woodchips through his palms.

“What are you looking for?” She studied the line on his bicep where the flesh turned brown-orange. That was their goal back home – sunburnt summers of FM radio, diet colas, and plastic squeeze bottles filled with olive oil.

“Slugs.”

She laughed. He didn’t. She flicked the top again, but it wouldn’t go, and the boy leaned forward onto his knees and snatched something from the paddle-shaped shadows of leaves on dirt. A slug – fat and Dijon-coloured. He held it out for her, the slimed crest of its back contracting between his fingers.

“What do you do with slugs?” Natalie said and pulled herself up. She tugged the squished fiddleheads from her back pocket and laid them on her lap.

“That’s secret.” He grinned and dropped the slug. It landed in the margarine container with a thwack. “Why’d you move here?”

“Secret.”

The boy pinched another slug from the chips. This one was black, and a pearly string of slime linked it to the ground. “Show you mine if you tell me yours.”

She waved a fiddlehead in figure-eights through the air and watched him scour the flowerbed. He paused and straightened his spine and watched her watch him. “My mom and brother died,” she said. “On that fishing boat.” The boy didn’t respond. “I stayed with my neighbours in Vancouver to finish the school year.”

The silence stretched as the boy bent low to peer again under the peony leaves.

Natalie made a fist and poked the plant in the space between her middle and index fingers. The pea-coloured spiral at the end bobbed forward like her uncle’s dashboard Jesus.

“Why do you collect fiddleheads,” the boy asked, face shrouded in the bush. Then he pulled himself up and squatted in her direction, the knees of his jeans patched with mud.

“Dunno. I like how they look.”

“How’s that?”

“How’s what?”

“How they look.”

She stuffed another fiddlehead into her knuckle. Its infant leaves wrinkly and balled into a bent finger. “Like a baby’s fist,” she said. She added a third between her pinkie and ring fingers. “Or the end of an octopus arm.” She pawed her fist toward him.

“What else?”

She examined the spirals, looped them through the air. “The goose head on Mary Poppins’ umbrella.”

The boy heaved himself onto the tabletop and plucked a coil from her fist, balancing it in the groove of his collarbone. Then he knotted his other hand around an imagined bow and arced it against his fiddle’s strings.

“You look like a grasshopper,” she said.

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