You Are Here

By Cynthia Flood

This collection will appeal to readers looking for honest depictions of family, and a changing natural and political environment—subjects which are particularly topical at this time. 

Award winning author whose short stories appear frequently in such publications as Queen’s Quarterly and Fireweed.

Potential for interest from academic market as creative writing course textbook.

Booksellers familiar with Flood’s previous collections, including Red Girl Rat Boy and What Can You Do, will be anticipating this newest addition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781771963428

Cynthia Flood

Cynthia Flood’s stories have won numerous awards, including The Journey Prize and a National Magazine Award. Her novel Making A Stone Of The Heart was nominated for the City of Vancouver Book Prize, and her acclaimed short story collections include Red Girl Rat Boy (2013) which was shortlisted for the BC Book Prizes fiction award.

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cover.jpg

You Are Here

Cynthia Flood

biblioasis

Windsor, Ontario

To the memory of my mother,

Luella Creighton,

1901–1996

Contents

Introduction

Gold, Silver, Ivory, Slate, and Wood

The Animals in Their Elements

Imperatives

Twoscore and Five

The Meaning of the Marriage

My Father Took a Cake to France

The Schooling of Women

A Young Girl-Typist Ran to Smolny

Early in the Morning

The Usual Accomplishments

Religious Knowledge

Miss Pringle’s Hour

To Be Queen

Red Girl Rat Boy

Blue Clouds

Addresses

Dirty Work

The Dog and the Sheep

Calm

Food

Summer Boy

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction

A Selected Stories tells a story of its own, of an author’s struggle and striving to learn, to improve, to use what life has thrown them: the story of a writer becoming a better writer. The best Selecteds show a true breadth, a wild variation studded with recurrent—or obsessive—themes, as well as an ever-evolving prowess. Such is the march of Cynthia Flood’s career.

To read from the first to the last page of any book, a reader has to wonder what is coming next and suspect it will be fascinating. Cynthia Flood’s stories lead to exactly this wonder and suspicion, even from the last page of one story to the beginning of the next. The themes that reappear—failures to communicate, romantic love, and complicated social structures around political action—are always reimagined, always coming at us in new guises. The first two are ubiquitous among short story writers or perhaps simply among humans—the last, fairly unusual—but all written with unstinting grace and penetrating, searing insight.

From her earliest book, the 1987 collection The Animals in Their Elements (Talonbooks), Flood has written about not only the work but also the social and emotional lives of the organizers on the political far left. The pairing of the subject matter and the form of A Young Girl-Typist Ran To Smolny: Notes For A Film makes it unique in Canadian literature. A ceaseless experimenter with form from the very beginning of her career, Flood structured this story, about a young woman selling subscriptions to a leftist newspaper, as notes towards a film, and furthermore half in footnotes, half in narrative. And of course, it takes as both its milieu and cause the past and present struggles of the revolutionary movement. Fascinating in their intimate detail of a world most of us know little about, these stories recur again and again throughout Flood’s oeuvre.

Girl-Typist’s formal experiment is of a type that can feel performative, but here it makes its purpose felt. Flood has twinned the narrator’s work of scene-setting with the scene-creation in Kate’s own imagination, which concerns the exact details of how of the titular young typist ran a message to Trotsky during the Russian revolution, and in turn how the narrator imagines Kate’s afternoon might be turned into a film script. If it sounds complicated, it is—but it works. The double lensing is effective and engrossing but even more impressive is that while the reader is carefully keeping track of the two layers of narrative and the two meta voices over top of those (Kate reflecting on how to envision the typist’s story while living her own, the narrator reflecting on how to envision Kate’s story), what emerges is a portrait of a young woman and the exercise of her beliefs. Kate struggles up and down the street, trying to overcome her shyness and sell newspaper subscriptions to strangers. It’s hard work and mainly unrewarding—but she makes one true connection with Mac, an older man who buys a subscription and has a former affiliation to the newspaper and the cause. He was eventually driven out of the movement by disability, disagreement, despair. His story is sad, but vague, and Flood offers the reader a moment to be swept away by it before the footnotes casually distance us with a hint of cynicism, or at least a reminder that cynicism is an option: " Throughout Mac’s story, speculation is encouraged re whether he would have spoken thus, or even considered speaking thus, if the revolutionary sales-person arriving on his doorstep had been male. Interested readers/viewers may care to imagine a version in which inhabitant of house and sales-person are respectively female and male, or both female. Such time-wasting fantasies can be most instructive."

Throughout her career, one of Flood’s gifts is to give words to the wordless. We see this starting in Animals in Their Elements in the title story. There, a stroke renders elderly solitary Harry silent (he was perhaps not all that chatty before) and yet his life in his family’s house, his connection with the birds he adores, his fear of the unknown, all punch through the page vividly. Words for the wordless is the theme of another story from Animals, Imperatives. Here, seven-year-old Nicola struggles largely in silence to comprehend the rules of her school, the constraints of her parents’ time and finances. Seeing her father shake the baby or her mother weeping while nursing, the little girl has no ability to help or even make her presence known—she went away fast and quietly and that is the end of these incidents. When Nicola loses the expensive pen her school requires, [s]he could not tell them, so she simply stops attending school, retreating further into a world of solitude and silence.

The theme of inarticulateness appears again two collections later in The English Stories (Biblioasis, 2009), a set of linked short stories. Here, in the story Religious Knowledge, a naïve and immature teacher by the suggestive name Miss Flower attempts to understand the world without truly interacting or speaking aloud to anyone. She teaches religious knowledge and tries to guide girls towards adulthood without being fully adult herself, despite her age. Her immaturity and silence result in an abused child being abandoned to her own devices. In this quotation, the teacher, herself not undamaged, ranges through her options for helping the young girl, garbled in with all the other things she dare not even attempt, all trapped within her own mind, unspoken:

Miss Flower gets up, looks in her mirror and then out the window where in the lowering dusk the beech trees shake their ragged leaves, dark red. To wear such colours! She must see the Head[mistress]. She imagines sunshine, herself in blue shorts astride an Irish bicycle. Unlike Miss Lincoln’s legs, hers do not resemble those of a dining table. She must tell the head what Amanda has told. At Christmas she may treat herself to nylon stockings, but first she must show that slip of paper. Can she do it? Miss Flower longs to quest. To go to Ireland. Can she choose to absent herself from home at Easter? To wear shorts? Mrs Flower never even rolls up the long sleeves of her dresses. Miss Flower has always celebrated Easter at her mother’s side. By mid-week, the mistress of Religious Knowledge has still not seen the Head.

This free-associative cluster of ideas that both attract and terrify Miss Flower is also a kind of poem, the loveliness of the dark red leaves and the blue shorts, the weirdness of promising herself a pair of pantyhose as a carrot for defending a student in her care from abuse. The reader journeys through the story with Miss Flower wondering how much she even knows about her true feelings. Her attempts to help Helen, to speak on her behalf, come to almost nothing and yet are at the same time the summit of Miss Flower’s bravery. Flood’s gift in this story is showing in Flower’s silence both her weakness and her strength.

In the short quotation above, we see the both the muddle and the music of genuine human thoughts. They run along no clear line but in the random neural firings of the human mind. Flood is able to shape this into the arc of a story without disrupting the human-ness of the thought process. We also see this in Gold, Silver, Ivory, Slate, and Wood in Flood’s second book, My Father Took a Cake to France (Talonbooks, 1992). This story documents Ray and Edie on a cross-country bus tour in celebration of thirty years of marriage and Ray’s retirement from a job in a shoe store. In one way, the story is linear—it follows the tour, restaurants, cities, highways, museums. But in truth the story is a swirl of Ray’s thoughts about his and Edie’s whole lives together, from their flower gardens to their medical diagnoses to a description of Edie’s eyelids as smooth, full, white. And it is a dreamy, quotidian tour of a love born out in the living.

The story ends with Ray feeling attracted to Edie after a game of Scrabble, and pulling her into bed after many years without physical intimacy. They make love, but every word of the story before that is love, practical yet gorgeous in the gentle detail: He moved one of the garden chairs to the end of the walk, by the back fence, so Edie could rest before they started back to the house for their second cup of coffee. To Ray, Edie looked pale. When she went to the restaurant washroom, he felt as if he were saying goodbye to her. He felt her feet thoroughly all over and she did not wince. In the museums and galleries on the tour, Edie always noticed children and animals in the paintings, sculptures, mosaics that the docents showed them. This is a story about the minutest pleasures of love, disguised by all the other things life has to offer.

And then its opposite, the title story of the same volume, My Father Took a Cake to France, is a story about a [d]our, stiff, critical man—the narrator’s father, described in the years before she was born. He fetishizes his romantic actions into a love story in which he is the only character. Feeling beaten before he starts because he is a Canadian living in England—and also because he likes the idea of himself as an underdog—he is briefly exultant when he goes to buy a cake for his young wife. He is happy in the cake shop because a pretty young woman stands before him to do his bidding though he later drop[s] her into that enormous wastebasket where he keeps people whom he does not currently need. He becomes absorbed in his fantasy of buying a cake for his strong-willed wife, although all his life my father yearns, or part of him yearns, for [his wife] to be fragile, delicate. He yearns himself to be the lover who gives gifts to this being who is other, oh very other, mysterious, unknown, in fact unknowable.… He yearns for his wife to be unlike herself, and buys a cake for this non-person—was there ever a less romantic gift wrapped up as a romantic one?

Although stories like these have a fair quirkiness to them, on the surface they seem to be fairly standard structures, even if written in elegant and penetrating prose. Starting in Flood’s third collection, The English Stories, we see the beginning of an evolution, a paring down of explanation, leaving the reader to sort out from the fragments of dialogue and glimpses of descriptions what exactly is going on. The sparse, skittering, and strange story The Usual Accomplishments tells the story of elderly twin sisters doing a very very hard crossword puzzle in their rooming house with an adolescent fellow boarder who cannot do most of the clues. In between the detailed elaboration of the clues, we get the sisters’ backstory, their own voices, and others’ opinions about them, as well as—through the young Amanda’s eyes—a bit of guidance on the whole confusing business.

In Flood’s fourth collection, Red Girl Rat Boy (Biblioasis, 2013), we see a further stripping away of both conventional narrative and conventional prose. Flood has never been telling exactly the stories we expected to read but has always seemed in search of ever more efficient and pure ways to tell a story, to inject narrative directly into a reader’s vein if possible. The title story in the collection, and this introduction-writer’s favourite, has almost no narrative explanation—since the characters already know what is going on, no solace is offered to a reader who doesn’t. And so readers walk their own pathway through the story, piecing together bits of information, half understood fragments, wondering, watching.

This story contains another of Flood’s wonderful child protagonists, silent Marcia who is obsessed with red hair. A child fixating on something rare and pretty isn’t so odd, but Marcia herself is odd, her fixation extreme, and Flood’s language makes sure we know this when Marcia surreptitiously reaches out to grab and fondle a classmate’s red-gold hair: Red-girl’s face was putty with small pale eyes. Irrelevant. That hair enlivened Marcia’s fingers, the crevices where they met her palms, the palms themselves. Her inner wrists shivered at the nearness of the silky warmth. Mesmerizing, how the classroom’s fluorescent beam bent one way on the curl’s crest and another in its hollow, while a single hair, fallen, made a sleek red thread on a sleeve. Read one way, these sentences are a little bizarre, but in another they are sensual, intense, and go some way towards explaining Marcia’s obsession—if Marcia’s mind works at such a pitch of clarity and beauty whenever she encounters red hair, no wonder she longs for it constantly.

But still, an outsider cannot entirely comprehend Marcia. This is one of a few stories Flood has written about a child’s imperfect understanding of the world but in Red Girl Rat Boy there is a second layer of narration from a Greek chorus of Marcia’s mother and aunts who themselves imperfectly understand the child. These women chronicle and criticize the girl’s life and actions from a mystified remove. If Marcia does not know exactly why she is compelled towards any hair where [r]ed was imaginable, she also doesn’t question or indeed consider her addiction. The older women do her thinking for her, and at the same time the aunts hector Marcia’s mother for enjoying sex enough to have wound up as a single parent. An atmosphere of sensuality cloaked in shame pervades the story and bleeds into how Marcia’s enjoyment of the hair is understood when it’s found out—with a puritanical shame.

And yet on a sentence level, Red Girl Rat Boy is often gorgeous, as much as the shining beauty Marcia sees in red hair. Here is the story’s crisis and climax:

As the speaker neared his final punchline, she remembered that fairy tales offered three chances. Only three. Grasping a tress of red silk, she raised the open blades as the laughing girl flung her head back hard and Rat-boy reached to grab Marcia where her breasts would have been if she’d had any.

Time, many people said.

Give it time. Giver her time.

Just let time pass. Which it did, though not because anyone let it.

How utterly gorgeous.

Another story about what is understood in silence, and what is going on outside, behind, and beyond the main narrative, is Food, in Flood’s most recent collection, with the emphatically unpunctuated title What Can You Do (Biblioasis, 2017). This story, like The Usual Accomplishments, concerns a pair of older, unmarried sisters bound together by duty, care, and a shared household in constrained circumstances. As in the older story, one sister considers herself the sane and worldly wise one, and does the bulk of the earning for the pair—the other seems in some ways the kinder and more interesting but is unable to fully take care of herself.

The two stories diverge from there —Accomplishments being set in staid 1950s England and Food in contemporary urban Canada. The two sisters go out to eat in a restaurant. While narrating the meal, the responsible sister also narrates her family’s backstory, her sister’s history of unplanned pregnancies and instability (chicken, egg?), and the unpleasant yet intriguing family dynamic of the group at the next table, which is centred on charming baby Charlotte.

The layered, almost fugal nature of the story is complicated to explain but simple and perfect to read—no detail of the sisters’ or Charlotte’s family’s story is confusing or irrelevant or imperfectly placed, though tightly woven together:

Two pieces of our bread remained. I still had most of my butter, my sister very little. Her eyes pleaded.

I wouldn’t. Why should I? She could have done as I did, saved her butter, got through school to a decent job. I’m fifty-two. She’s fifty-seven, done with menopause, but always I arrange with a staff person to phone me at once if she shows interest in any man. No call for three years. Still I can’t say that’s over.

Dad said, ‘Stop wriggling!’

‘She can’t.’ Ellie took Charlotte from the high chair and set her on the floor by the tote bag. ‘See? She’ll be just here, between us.’

Grandmother asked, ‘Is that wise?’

The echoing of familial relationships, the bonds of care, the sheer trouble of love and responsibility between the two tables are striking, and funny, and sad.

My favourite story in What Can You Do, and probably in all of Flood’s oeuvre—and one of my favourites anywhere—is Calm. This is the story of a young boy exploring Vancouver late at night in an attempt to get a better look at some police horses. As in Food, here we have the boy’s journey through the night woven together with a history of sadness and trauma in his family. In this case, the history is the family’s recent move to the city, coupled with a suggestion of abuse at the hands of his mother and stepfather. This is done with the lightest hand: "Bad. His bruises still hurt on the first page of the story followed by the echoed Bad a couple of pages later at his memory of a minor transgression and finally another Bad" on the final page when the boy returns home and encounters his angry parents.

So it’s a sad story in many ways, of a child alone in a strange city with his violent and neglectful parents, but those aspects fade away for the reader as they seem to do for the boy as he walks through the night in pursuit of those horses. From the first moment, as [s]trong feet stepped into the boy’s dream, came nearer down the hall, and he sat up, but the sounds went past, outside and he escapes via window and fire escape to follow them out and through downtown, both protagonist and reader are captivated. And then the gorgeous climax:

He slowed, guessing, and turned from the horses, south and then west in a long watchful arc through both open and wooded areas. Breathed leaves, a trace of skunk, of cigarette. Uphill then, on to the high bank overlooking the ocean. Here he squatted under a shore-pine distorted by wind and weather, smelled algae, watched the incoming tide’s long frills of white collapse on the sand. Soaked runners, cold sockless feet—he didn’t care, looked north. I was right. Only a hundred metres away the quartet walked towards a ramp that sloped to the beach. Touching the concrete, the lead animals snorted, and the riders spoke gently, stroking.

When hooves met beach the four horses trotted south almost as far as the point, almost gone from view—then back again, under the boy’s high perch, to and fro, to and fro. The animals’ muscles created light patterns on their coats while the waves gleamed under the moon, fell into silver-marbled froth and made their hssshing sound.

When the riders headed straight at the water, the boy gasped. He couldn’t swim. Nodding, the horses waded in. They stepped freely, splashed, came back to shore, reversed and went forward again into the waves, whinnying. They’re happy! The riders turned them tightly, splashing through the shallows as if in an enclosure rather than the Pacific. Turn, turn—and out of the water they came, dripping, tossing their manes, to shoulder sideways, back and forth, steady pairs dancing while the sand bounced up by their hooves.

Such intense physicality, such visual clarity, all constructed of words—and all for a silent character.

As well, there’s the thread of Resist! that runs through the story—the political action posters that the boy encounters as he moves through the city, hinting at the Occupy movement and all that it signifies, but also a hint as to the child’s strength and all that he is going to do. The videos he has been watching of horses subduing riots inspire in the boy the idea that he will someday be strong enough to rise up against his abusive parents, strongly, calmly, despite the fact he is currently at their mercy—the story ends with his body back in their home and control, but his mind still caught up in the hope and inspiration of the horses:

Somehow the key’s noise woke them at home. Bad. His wet, dirty clothes enraged his mother. The man never needed a reason, but used that one too.

In bed at last, he thought a bit about how one day he’d shove them off, shove as if they were an enormous ball, six feet in diameter, rolling about a training ring to impede his progress. As horses do when skilled in crowd control, he’d shoulder them. Lean against them, step sideways, step and step and another patient step till, like him now, they’d have no choice. Steady he’d be, calm.

Mostly he imagined stables. He’d stand close, look up. Touch? Feed? Once he’d seen a girl hold out an apple. Big teeth showed as the hairy lips lifted back, and the horse crunched the fruit.

The boy raised his hand, held his palm flat.

Cynthia Flood’s constructions with words are revelations—I wish you the joy of reading them.

Rebecca Rosenblum

Toronto, April 2019

Gold, Silver, Ivory, Slate, and Wood

Even out in the hot country, in the great empty provinces and states that towered and rolled and sloped and stretched from coast to coast, in the huge landscapes where the tour coach buzzed across flat terrain like the needle of a sewing machine across a giant sheet—even there, hundreds of people were always around whenever they stopped at an attraction. Often it was hard for Ray to get a good picture. And in the cities, the crowds of tourists were terrible.

Once Edie fainted in the heat. This was on their last morning in New York. The bus—not the friendly tour coach, just a regular city bus—was lurching up Fifth Avenue. The vehicle and the street and the sidewalks were crammed. Edie slumped over onto Ray. Tiffany’s was to the right—Edie was missing it! Ray looked around but no face of any age or colour showed recognition of his difficulty. Edie’s mouth opened. Was she going to be sick? He must get her head down, restore the blood. Awkwardly he manoeuvred himself sideways. The bus jolted. Edie’s head fell heavily onto his thighs. Her glasses went askew and the riders stuck up through her grey hair like antlers. Ray took off the glasses and pushed Edie over so her head hung between her knees. Her summer dress stretched thin over the straps of her bra and lace-trimmed slip. Through the fabric he saw several moles, close together: a brown snowflake. He had not noticed that in years. By the upper sixties he judged it was safe for them to get off the bus, find a taxi.

Back at the hotel, Edie said she wanted to take a turn around the block, to get some air. Ray agreed, though he was worried about checkout time, about getting on the tour bus. Of course he had his arm firmly under Edie’s, steering her. A light shower came. The warm drops might mean thunder; how would it be for them, riding the bus in a storm? Ray saw his wife turn her head upwards and smile as the water fell on her cheeks, on her pearl necklace. He was tired, or something—he would be glad to get back into the dry. He felt funny, not really funny—he could not find other terms. Ray wanted to hurry.

In their room, after Edie had rested while he packed up, and then washed her face and tidied her hair, she said, Ray, my glasses? He could not remember. He checked his pockets. Polishing his own glasses, he reviewed events. He had not thought to take the number of the bus, the cab. So the glasses were gone. Then Edie said what Ray always found so irritating.

I’ll be fine, she said.

But their extra medical insurance was designed to smooth out just such mishaps. She could visit a New York optometrist; they could stay in the city a day or so longer, to get the new glasses, and join the next Travellers’ Joy tour.

Edie said, I don’t want to meet a whole lot of strangers on another tour. I like the people we’re with now.

Ray did not share her sentiment. And if they had taken any other Travellers’ Joy tour, say the preceding or the following one, wouldn’t Edie have liked the people on it too? But he saw that she felt strongly, so he let that go.

He moved to his next argument: a principal reason for travelling, especially on a cross-continental bus tour, was to see things.

I’ll see, Edie said matter-of-factly. It’s just a bit blurry is all. Kind of nice actually. Like those French impressionists in Texas or Arizona or wherever they were.

The diagnosis of Edie’s MS had come shortly before the three great events: their thirtieth wedding anniversary; Ray’s retirement, after almost four decades, from the shoe store; and the commencement of the trip. The doctor’s words shocked them. Yet Ray felt also the calm coincident with anticipated disaster. Edie had always been frail, he was robust. He was accustomed to the necessity of sparing her, now would simply have to spare her more. And Edie was surely enjoying herself on this trip. We’re seeing so much, Ray, she kept saying, I never knew, did you? Unlike many of the other passengers, she did not each day refer more often to the happiness of going home.

Probably, Ray thought, his insides would feel better once he got there.

Pearls were the gift for a thirtieth anniversary (Ray had checked the almanac). He had considered giving Edie a pearl ring, but in recent years her fingers had begun to warp with arthritis. He looked at brooches, scarf-pins, bracelets, earrings. Eventually he chose a necklace. The graduated order of the pearls satisfied him, although the clasp had to be changed, for in Ray’s experience a pair of