The Plainness of My Fall

By Janice Garden Macdonald

A collection of award winning short stories including the Zoetrope All Story first prize as judged by Joyce Carol Oates.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Janice Garden Macdonald
• Release date: Nov 4, 2010
• ISBN: 9780986783104

Janice Garden Macdonald

Janice Macdonald is a Canadian author with several short fiction awards including most recently a Moondance Film Festival Award. In 2008 she received the Zoetrope All Story First Prize for "The Plainness of My Fall," a short story judged by Joyce Carol Oates.Janice studied screenwriting and editing through the University of Waterloo.Special thanks to the Canada Council for Literary Arts for their assistance in the completion her first collection of short stories.

Book preview

The Plainness of My Fall

Award Winning Short Stories

by

Janice Garden Macdonald

Copyright 2010 Janice Garden Macdonald

Table of Contents

Walrus in a Glass Cage

Snow Day

The Plainness of My Fall

Why Waste Good Beer?

The Birdhouse

The Corner Apartment

Credits

Walrus in a Glass Cage

Three whalers with harpoons, four dogs, one fat hooded baby and seventeen bears. Blue ran over the list in her head one more time. There were others too, less important but still irritating. Like the wooden ones and the stone carving of a bar of soap in the bathroom. A kind of ‘in’ joke, that left her out. She didn't mind that so much, but her mother dragged everyone, even her friends, into the can to see the ‘soap stone’.

Blue calmly made her wish, the same wish as yesterday morning and the morning before that. Standing on her bed, she placed her cupped hands against the window. She scraped a fingernail across the frosty pane. Who can find out? And who will care anyway?

Fall had been dragging on. Leaves clung stubbornly to the trees like burrs to a wool toque. And even now there were birds pecking in the sills; birds that should have been on a southern flight weeks ago. Blue wondered if their natural clocks had stopped ticking, perhaps because they had nested under the new power station. Or maybe they just couldn't remember when the berries didn't hang ripe on the bushes, or when there weren't fish drying on at least one tarmac roof.

But that wasn't important now. Today not the geese or gulls, or crows, or birds of any type would distract her. And the window over Blue's bed glistened like an exquisite painting in an art book. It was a good sign. Snow, prayed Blue. She wished for snow, so that Edward would be gone all day.

In the living room, the curtains were drawn and the air was stale with last night's shadows and sounds. Nearly hidden in the corner was the dreaded statue. Sculpture, Edward called it. Blue didn't really know the difference, but she did know that the slab of rock, shaped like a fat walrus, took up too much space, collected too much dust, and possibly even came to life in the dark. Hadn't she heard it grunting and groaning just last night?

From outside, the unmistakable crash of tin garbage cans being wrestled to the ground interrupted the awful white silence that lurked inside the cabin. It obliterated the hum and buzz that permeated the entire yard since the electricity was hooked in three years ago. And it smashed through Blue's daydream, hitting her straight between the eyes the same way that lightening slams into a tree trunk.

She imagined her skull split open like a walnut, the nutmeat her brain, the wish escaping, floating away from her. Then with a single motion, Blue flung open the back door and hurled a wine bottle across the yard. It missed crazy Jack's mutt-dog by a mile. She always missed, but the dog scampered off anyway. Go mess up George's place, Blue called after him. Or better yet, his stupid kids might be down at the dump with their pellet guns.

Blue would have to clean up the mess later. It was her job to burn the garbage now that her mom worked days. Edward never helped. He couldn't risk hurting his hands.

She shifted her gaze from the spilled macaroni and broken tea bags, across the yard to the electric pole by the shed. The wire was swaying dangerously. Or at least it looked dangerous to her. Once, it had actually broken during a storm. Blue didn't remember the linesman coming to fix it. She only remembered the wire, dancing like a wild lasso and the trail of purple sparks that clung to the inside of her eyelids afterward. And she remembered that the wire had whipped the paint right off the top of her dad's pick-up truck.

But Blue would think about that later. Right now more important things were at hand. Like the snow. It was indeed falling, and already the earth was purified. This was the final ingredient needed to make her wish come true, and well, nothing could stop her now that the conjuring was done.

Forgetting her breakfast, forgetting the dog outside and the tipped garbage cans and swaying wires, Blue rushed back into the smaller of two small bedrooms where she pulled off her flannel nightgown and welcomed the cold with a genuine shiver.

Today, it's going to happen just like I want. She could feel it in the cool draft coming from around her bedroom window. Poor Edward, he really hated to work at a common-man's job, like plowing snow. For once, Blue actually enjoyed thinking about her mom's new boyfriend.

The linoleum floor was freezing. The shower sprayed hot and cold onto her skin. It was impossible to steady the temperature and the cabin was getting colder even with all the base heaters turned on. It was all part of the ritual. Not that Blue really knew about rituals, but she imagined that she knew. And for today, that was enough.

She hurried into