Fiddlehead - Current Issue

First Prize, Short Fiction
From Worried Women's Guide by Eliza Robertson

They removed Bea's ovaries during that period of June where you can't walk a foot without killing a caterpillar. A week after the oophorectomy and she was rolling up her driveway in a chair rented from the Princeton hospital, her ex-husband's son Huck at the helm. He weaved the chair in and out and over inside-out caterpillars whose pastel entrails were like nurse scrubs and mint juleps, and when he bisected one with a wheel its ends curled like a whistling tongue. She had expected it to slice right through. Sun soaked through the turmeric-dyed cotton of her caftan and reflected jaundice over her thighs, until the shade of a cottonwood tree halfway up the drive reblanched her skin and backlit the bumps that puckered from her hair follicles. She tugged the hem over her knees. When she let go the cloth shrugged up her thighs enough to flash the white from her diaper - incontinence an anticipated upshot (downshot?) of vaginal trauma. She adjusted the hem, crushed the cotton into her knee with her palm, and hoped to Jove that her ex-husband's son had failed to catch a glimpse from his eagle-eye view at the handlebars.

She had awakened that morning to find her morphine button missing and a bronze stilts-walker of a man hovering at the door, his neck bent to fit the frame like that giraffe from the Santa Barbara zoo with a ninety-degree spine.

"Beatrice Cooper?" he said. He wore a snap-button shirt with a rattlesnake stitched above the breast pocket, and he hugged a felt hat under his armpit, his biceps squashing the crown into his ribs so that she thought it might pop inside out.

"Bea," she said.

"I'm Huck," he stepped through the frame and uncrooked his neck. "Parker's son." He had a hook nose and eyes like two shots of absinthe. When she stared at him he blinked a lot.

ELIZA ROBERTSON studies creative writing and political science at the University of Victoria. Her work has appeared in The Malahat Review, where she now serves as an intern on the fiction editorial board.

Honourable Mention, Short Fiction
From Oh, Mary, Mah-Lee, Mandy by Sara Heinonen

It's not often a foreigner appears in Mrs. Chin's 38th floor Hong Kong apartment. I have the only blue eyes and blonde hair in the neighbourhood and she's determined to show them off. Every morning before breakfast, she drags me down to the crowded street market and takes her time selecting from identical oranges heaped on carts so that my Caucasian features can be thoroughly inspected. Surrounded by grinning fruit and vegetable hawkers, my insecurities are like a layer of sweat on my skin. Then we pass the sidewalk butcher with the missing digits. At his feet, the severed head of an ox gives me a one-eyed get-over-it stare.

Two weeks into my trip and a few days left to endure. I have journeyed to this family of Chins - to their 550-square-foot sky-pad with bedrooms the size of beds. I had been content with my room in Mom's condo and job in her gift shop, with all that Canadiana bric-a-brac: loons on turquoise sweatshirts, scented CN Tower candles. Then came the call from Winnie Chin, Mom's Hong Kong-based supplier and good friend, inviting me to visit.

"Oh, Mary, go!" Mom chimed. "It'll change your life." (That's what I'm afraid of.) "Maybe you'll meet someone special." (I'm afraid of that too.)

I was launched Far Eastward within the week.

Only to land in a city so frenzied it pains my brain to walk it. Sidewalks packed to elevator-density mere centimetres from highway-speed traffic, dangling signage poised to crush unsuspecting pedestrians, a constant soundtrack of jackhammers, the humid air a pungent brew of fish, diesel, and musty herbs. Two days of that and I gave up on sightseeing, tried escaping to the malls on the advice of my Broads Abroad Shopping Guide (gift from Mom). Endless boutiques stocked with expressionless sales-waifs but never jeans big enough for North American butts. I gave up on shopping too.

SARA HEINONEN is a Toronto writer and landscape architect whose fiction has appeared in Event, Grain, Taddle Creek, and This Magazine. She has recently completed a manuscript of stories that range from sad to satirical.

Honourable Mention, Short Fiction
From Waves by Susi Lovell

I'd found him on the beach. Mother was furious. I hoisted myself up on the kitchen sink and stared at him through the window as he lowered himself onto the old maroon car bench in the garden and lifted his face to the sun. But his eyes, I wanted to say to Mother, his blue eyes, don't they remind you?

"Anyone out on that beach, you can be sure they're up to no good," she said, lips pressed together in a thin jagged line.

All the same, she gave him a ham and cheese sandwich (and with an extra slice of ham too, which meant Dodie and I had half each less - saliva swam in my mouth) before sending him on his way. I went to the gate and watched until his floppy hat disappeared in the dunes. Then he was just a speck on the beach. The tide was out.

"Oh Lord, whatever next," sighed Mother.

"Now she's upset Mother," Dodie said in the growly voice she used for Red Bunting, and then in her own light voice: "It's not her fault. She didn't mean to." I squeezed my hands into tight fists and twisted one up, one down. Tears sprang to her eyes. "Ow, ow," she howled. "You're hurting Red Bunting."

"Leave your sister alone," Mother ordered from the kitchen.

"I haven't touched her."

Dodie gave a few sniffly sobs on Red Bunting's behalf.

"Madeleine, I said stop it this instant. Don't make me ask you again."

SUSI LOVELL lives, writes, and teaches movement and physical theatre in the Montreal area. She has written on dance for the Montreal Gazette and recently completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Lesley University, MA.

Winner of the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize
Possum by Jeff Steudel

After my nap, I helped my neighbours
carry tent poles and tarps to the peacock shed.
"Dead a week?" I asked. "Nothing's still
eating that," said Stevie. "What a strange place
to die," said Mia. The possum's fallen face
flat on a mop handle. An empty plastic cup
inches from its rotten teeth like chalk.

Had the peacocks found their python-
snagging ways, while the possum lapped up
a left-over Mojito from Friday night's bonfire?
Or was it Rusty Ham, the cat I mistook
for a cougar on the pergola - his mea culpa
before being relocated to the city? Maybe,
after gorging on all my coffee filters mixed
into the compost, the possum lay down
its racing heart in the heat wave of summer.

When Mia and Stevie left to unload
the rest of the trade stand into the house,
I rocked the carcass onto a spade, held up
its limp tail with a broom and carried it
to the anthill behind the vacant chicken coop.
Sometime later I would examine it for signs
of fracture. The only sure thing that day,
there would be no more sleep.

No more sleep, even though the flies
had settled, and the long dry grass was still.
And the thrushes were silent. The evening
sky a deep blue. I did my best to become
comfortable in the stasis, but a waft of warm wind
appeared from the east. I raised my arms to it.
I stood up, and it vanished. When I lay down,
it came once more, brief and light.

JEFF STEUDEL's work has recently appeared in Prism Internationaland Existere. He lives in Vancouver.

Honourable Mention, Poetry
Littoralby Kim Trainor

Scrabbling over rocks at Drumbeg
my foot snagged on the jagged edge
of a barnacle - grey-white

tooth with armoured plates, inert
and indifferent as stone, until you
crouch down close to see it

the little flicking tongue
that comes with the rising tide
like the pain that sears along

the razor-thin line
of this cut that left no trace,
not the palest cicatrice.

A severed nerve flares up
like an insistent memory
of the body that opens so easily,

metallic red poured down
into the dark receiving sea of
silken ash and shards of bone.

KIM TRAINOR's short fiction has appeared in journals such as PRISM international, Grain, and The Antigonish Review. "Littoral" is her first published poem. She lives in Vancouver.

Honourable Mention, Poetry
I Dreamt I died in Dubrovnik by Heidi Garnett

More kin to bird than human now
the dead wander through town dressed in best clothes,
                               no shoes,
just socks.
Their large wings and harp-shaped chests
brush against fuchsia bougainvillea spilling
into narrow streets, candied orange peel
and dried figs hung outside small shops.
                               Daily,
they climb the hundred steps
from the parapets to the shoulders of walls
to gaze over the turquoise Adriatic.
                               A cooling of the air
when they sit in empty chairs at outdoor cafés
or peer over shoulders of the living
at photographs of themselves
in the martyrs' room, their puzzled expressions
at seeing who they were. Across the hall
a display of contemporary art,
                               women mostly,
long dark hair tied into knots at napes of necks,
redolent bodies etched with vineyards
disappearing between naked breasts. At noon
when the bell tower rings the day into before
and after the dead startle up
and fly in widening circles above a small square
where farmers sell kumquats, potatoes and lavender
from makeshift stands.
                               The dead
make the loveliest sounds then.
Those who have never heard their music
stop bewildered by half-forgotten memories
drifting down to linger in shaded porticoes
of honey stone buildings.

HEIDI GARNETT has pursued her love of writing since retiring from teaching. She has published in a variety of magazines such as Room, The New Quarterly, and Event. Her first book, Phophorus, was published in 2006 by Thistledown Press.

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