Give Us This Day

By Terence Young

Give Us This Day is a striking collection of short fiction that explores the weight of the past through a kaleidoscope of voices and styles. From retired grandparents thrust into unexpected childcare parenthood to young labourers adrift in mines and road crews, from teachers struggling to find meaning in their classrooms to couples at a crossroads, these stories capture the quiet reckonings of everyday existence. Whether intimate or expansive, meditative or urgent, each story reveals how missteps and circumstances shape identity, and how, for many, the past is never truly left behind. Give Us This Day is a profound meditation on regret, resilience, and the fragile beauty of human connection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Signature Editions
• Release date: Oct 22, 2025
• ISBN: 9781773241623

Terence Young

Terence Young recently retired from teaching English and creative writing at St. Michaels University School. He is a co-founder and former editor of The Claremont Review, an international literary journal for young writers. His first collection of poetry, The Island in Winter (Véhicule Press, 1999), was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Gerald Lampert Award. Since then, he has published several books: a collection of stories, Rhymes With Useless, which was one of two runners-up for the annual Danuta Gleed award; a novel, After Goodlake’s, which received the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize in 2005; and a second collection of poetry, Moving Day, which was nominated for both the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize in 2006. In 2008, he was awarded the Prime Minister's Award for Teaching Excellence. More recently he received a National Magazine Award for his poem “The Bear,” and was the 2019 winner of the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest. Young lives in Victoria, BC.

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Contents

Mantra: 9

Liquor Run, 1972: 13

Work Song: 26

Host: 33

Tulku: 42

Be Kind, Be Calm, Be Safe: 55

Black Tusk: 63

Fingerlings: 77

Golden Years: 90

Handsome Is as Handsome Does: 103

Daily Bread: 113

The Sins of the World: 124

End of the Line: 136

Nostalgia: 142

Mantra

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin — Keats

Gillian and I lie on the floor together, eyes closed, and listen. Nightingales call from the laptop’s tinny speakers into the pre-dawn quiet of her bedroom. Over the last few weeks, their song has become familiar to us, so crazy happy, even though neither of us has ever actually seen one. I’ve turned off all the lights and opened the window to let the air roll in over the sill, warm now that it’s May and full of the smells of flowers from the park down the block and the beach below it. Wild rose, cherry, and something else... lilac? magnolia? It bothers me that I can’t tell, but this is no hour to obsess about the names of flowers. Gillian gets up to lower the blind against the street and dim the computer screen to nothing, so that in the darkness and with the blossoms’ scent filling the room, it’s almost easy to imagine we’re in a back garden in Oxted in the spring of 1942, retro radio technicians all around us holding microphones over their heads to catch birdsong for BBC listeners in their blacked-out homes. Except Londoners didn’t get a chance to hear these birds, not that night.

My ear’s not good enough to tell if there’s one nightingale talking to himself or a hundred, but a real birder could, Gillian’s cousin, for sure, with all those CDs of songsters in her car for the ride to work, teaching herself to whistle a response. Some smart music grad’s going to sample all these bird sounds some day and burn himself a novelty album, and there’ll be a Christmas song on it that will make him rich. I’d do it, but like I say, my ear’s bad, tone deaf.

The nightingales keep singing while something else intrudes — we both know it’s coming — another sound, a drone, super faint at first but getting louder. In another minute, it drowns out the birds — squadrons of R.A.F. Lancasters passing over Surrey on their way to bomb the city of Mannheim in Germany. Even through the computer’s small sound system, I can feel the weight of these machines in the sky above me, the payload of bombs they’re carrying, the fear gripping the crew members flying them, some younger than me, younger even than Gillian, no idea if they’re coming home again. On the flipside of the original 78 RPM, the same microphones catch the planes again when they return, and anyone who listens to both sides can tell their numbers are thinner now, the roar of their Rolls-Royce engines not as loud as it was on the way out. We always listen to both. Nobody at the time heard any of this because a sound engineer who worried about giving away flight details to the enemy cancelled the broadcast. But the microphones stayed on long enough for someone back at BBC headquarters to cut a gramophone record of the night’s sounds, which is what Gillian and I are listening to now and have already listened to a dozen times before, not the actual record but an MP3 we found online. Maybe the engineer loved the two sounds so much, how different they were, one so beautiful and the other so frightening, that he just couldn’t bear to let them go.

Gillian knows all the details, so do I. She loves them the way she loves a good story. We both wish we could have been there, stupid as it sounds to say. When the recording ends, we pull ourselves up onto all fours and pad as quietly as we can over to the open window. I’m not supposed to be here this late, now that Gillian’s illness has got worse, but it’s hard to stay away when I know she wants me with her and I want to be with her, too. She raises the blind and we lean our heads out into the night. No doomed aircraft, no sleeping England, no channel pillboxes. Just a noisy transformer on a power pole humming in the early morning and, until someone finally shuts it off, a car alarm that keeps repeating its annoying trills and beeps as though someone’s making fun of our long-dead nightingales.

My grandmother was just a kid then, Gillian says.

Your grandmother was two.

That’s what I said, a kid.

A baby is more like.

Still, she was there.

Yorkshire is further north.

You know what I mean.

I do know what she means, but I think it’s good for Gillian to have somebody contradict her once in a while. People are so careful around her these days. They think she’s fragile, but they’re wrong. She’s stronger than all of them.

It’s different, she says.

It certainly is.

From a history book, I mean, she says. I wouldn’t listen to it if it were part of a course. I just wouldn’t.

It’s like hearing the past, I say.

Kneeling at a keyhole and eavesdropping.

Gillian has said this before. She has even used the identical words, keyhole and eavesdropping. They’re a mantra for her, something to relieve her stress, so I play along with her, repeating what I have said before, too. She’s like a child who wants to hear the same book over and over again. My parents used to do something like it when they’d just weathered one of their storms. There’d be a breather in whatever battle they’d been fighting, a few days when they’d be on their best behaviour, scared of what they might have done, and my father would lay a fire in the living room or cook up something special for dinner.

You gotta love a fire, he’d say.

Or, Is there anything better than butter and cream and white wine?

And my mother would fall right into role, lighting candles or turning on the jazz station, keeping it light, upbeat, friendly, reverting to a happier time when they didn’t have to pretend.

Gillian’s not trying to keep things pleasant so much as she wants to leave what’s unpleasant behind. It’s her favourite thing to do, thinking about the past, especially the war, what it was like to live through it. I like it, too, but mostly because she does. I like everything about Gillian.

They’re all dead now, even the ones who came back alive.

There are still veterans left from the war, I say.

Chances are, though.

Yeah, chances are.

And even if those radio technicians are now dead, and all the pilots and bombardiers and navigators and tail gunners who lived to marry and have children are also dead, the idea is still a comfort to Gillian. Survival appeals to her. I know it does. I can hear it in her voice. I can see it in her face in the silver light of the streetlamp, how the thought relaxes her, the idea of passing through something bad and continuing on to a ripe old age with kids and grandkids. It appeals to me, and I’m not even sick.

A lunatic jogger passes by the house without looking up, somebody bent on surviving, too, even if it means running in the dark at 3:30 am. We watch him lope out of sight around the corner, his footfalls receding in the distance, like the sound of those bombers on their way to the continent.

What will happen is that Gillian’s mother will find me here in the morning on the floor beside her daughter’s childhood bed, her daughter who is twenty-three years old and should be living in an apartment with me, finishing her undergraduate years in socio-linguistics. What will happen is she will offer me breakfast, and I will beg off, telling her I’m sorry, I can’t stay, that I don’t want to be any trouble. The late shift at the restaurant always makes it hard for me to sleep, and I just came by to see if she was up and she was. What will happen is that Gillian will get a little more tired each day or she won’t. Her doctor will keep upping the dosage of hydromorphone or she won’t. Gillian and I will see spring turn to summer, turn to fall, turn to winter and back to spring again or we won’t.

White hawthorn, that’s it. Such a powerful smell, sick and sweet at the same time. Almost repulsive. It’s hard to believe I could forget its name. Seems no point at night, not a bee around, everything asleep. Gillian should be, too, but she’ll want to listen to the nightingales one more time before sunrise. I know she will. Those birds, those planes. Why not?

Liquor Run, 1972

It was a weekend. Everybody was taking a break, even the road crew. A weekend in nowhere, but it was better than working. Cookie came in late Friday night with another two weeks’ food and the mail, which he handed out during breakfast. There was a fat envelope from my mother, full of news clippings and a single page of blue stationery describing the status of our aging cat, the crises my father had survived since becoming a boat owner, the current progress of my sister, her husband and their son with their move to town, and the highlights of the garden. In an earlier package, she included a photo of my father at his retirement bash, the awkward pose he always strikes, a mouthful of teeth he can never bend into a smile. I have the same problem — too many, too long, all of them my father’s gift to his children. In the man’s defence, I will say those incisors have come in handy more than once.

My mother’s letter was a comfortably boring read, the sort of thing she wrote to my father during the war, more to confirm her affection than to convey information. I’d only just turned nineteen, but I was already aware of the perils of homesickness. The urge to wallow in her breezy snippets of gossip was something I had to fight.

There was another letter from my friend Phee and one from Heather, a girl I’d spent a few nights and days beside making promises I probably shouldn’t have made, and whose name on the return address filled me with both joy and gloom. She was a good news/bad news person, a girl who could turn my whole day upside down in a couple of sentences. It was dangerous even to think about what she had to say. Lucky for me the door of the trailer opened at that precise moment and Tim walked in.

Saddle up, Golly. We’re taking a drive.

The name is Michael and it’s Saturday.

Time and a half, Tim said. He picked up one of his titty magazines and threw it at me.

Didn’t we buy him a case two weeks ago? The man drinks more in an afternoon than I do in a year.

He’s an alcoholic. That’s what alcoholics do.

Yes, I said, but we shouldn’t be helping him.

We’re not helping him, Tim said. Nobody can help him. We’re helping ourselves. The more money I make this summer, the less I have to work next winter. It’s that simple. He’s our boss, and it’s bad policy to say no to the boss. You remember that.

I could have asked Tim if he’d give the same advice to his pretty new wife who had landed her own summer job in oil-rich Calgary, but given the desperate sexual privations Tim had been confessing to of late, I kept quiet.

The drive, sixty miles of it, was all gravel and washboard, worse once you hit the winding mountain road through Bear Pass into Stewart, a town that for Tim also meant a detour across the border into Hyder, Alaska, for some fun of his own. I had no desire to lose a day of my weekend just to buy a case of Canadian Club for our drunk of a project supervisor who spent his time sitting in the darkness of his private single-wide, numbing himself until October when the road expansion would be complete and he could go home and numb himself all over again.

The weather was hot. Withering. It felt good to be inside a trailer and out of the sun for a change, lying on my bunk and letting the plastic fan I’d bought in Terrace send some cooling air my way. But Tim was already throwing his binoculars and camera into a shoulder bag. There was nothing to do but slip my feet into my work boots and join him.

I gathered up the letters and stuffed them into a canvas pack, along with my toothbrush and the copy of Crime and Punishment I’d been pushing my way through most of spring and summer. I’d been reading the book so long that Raskolnikov had become a swear word I used whenever things didn’t go right on survey. A smattering of foreign words will garner a man a measure of respect from his colleagues, as long as he doesn’t insult their intelligence by speaking at length in another language.

Tim was already out the door, walking down the common plywood causeway that linked all four of the camp’s bunkhouse trailers. I took a quick look around the room, sickened I could feel sad to leave a hole like that, then rushed out to the brand new International Harvester crew-cab that was ours to use by order of the camp supervisor who liked us and had chosen Tim and me out of all the others to run his errands. We passed the man’s trailer on our way, and he came out to slip us the cash for the rye.

Tim rolled down his window.

Morning, Mr. Thomas, he said.

Nice day for a drive, boys. I almost feel I should come along. He wore the khaki trousers and shirt all project supervisors wore. His were immaculate, the creases sharp, and his boots gleaming from a fresh application of Protex. He reminded me of a British officer, the kind I’d seen in films of the Second World War, a man obsessed with routine and appearance, as though without them he might go insane, except Mr. Thomas was already completely crazy, and an alcoholic, too. I knew the man had a wife back on the coast. Every time I looked at him I wondered what kind of a woman would marry someone like him.

We’ll make good time, sir, Tim said.

No hurry.

He was putting on a show for our benefit, but there was a touch of panic in his voice. I had to hand it to him. From the few times I’d come near to drinking as much as that man did in a single night, I couldn’t imagine having the stomach to face a repeat performance the next day.

It was just after eleven in the morning when we idled out to the main road in first gear. The cook was standing watch for garbage-hungry bears. He raised his 12-gauge in salute as we passed. In a minute, we were heading north alongside the Meziadin River to the junction of the Stewart-Cassiar highway and Highway 37.

The road to the junction was a pretty one — at least it would be until our road crew got there and ruined it. There were Sitka spruce lining the right of way, some over six feet in diameter, and stream crossings with pools on either side of the road, waterfalls by the dozen. I felt as though we were driving through a national park on one of those winding roads that tries to avoid hurting anything. The road crew’s job was to take out the curves, level the hills and make it wider, industry standard. Their biggest accomplishment was a bridge over the Meziadin River, a jumble of braced timbers and heavy wooden beams they’d started the year before, and now that they’d finished it, the road builders could begin tearing into the land on the other side. The destruction hadn’t reached this far north yet, so I could still feel good about myself, but I knew I’d be full of regret by summer’s end.

Once we hit Meziadin Junction, the scenery shifted to wide-angle. We became a bullet of dust, windows up and the fan on high to keep out the road dirt our wheels ground into the air. We headed west into hills of cut blocks and fireweed, looping back and forth across gravelly stream beds where the