 |
 |
 |
 |
Man, this is close to a perfect short story for me. Deeply emotive, sweet and biting all at once, The Weather Inside traces a small family through the seasons with one of the children very sick. Mirieille Juchau does a wonderful job of capturing the tenderness, the pain and those small, happy moments when you can almost forget. It's a lovely, lovely piece of writing.In the months after Pip’s funeral your mother started carrying the umbrella. Sometimes the sky was tremendously clear. Blue as a borage, threatening nothing. You didn’t like to see her in the town this way, her face so deeply shaded that it looked as if the umbrella was walking on its own. Sometimes she arrived home with her hair quite wet, and the weather dry, quietly folding the brolly into itself. Your father was often away, following the honeyflow. Ironwood at Caster’s Creek, Salvation Jane on Hussaini’s acres. In the chemist two women watched your mother through plate glass. Is it her skin she’s saving or something else? they asked. You had to run out so you wouldn’t shout, Meg’s Ventolin and Prednisone rattling in a paper bag. You know, it doesn’t make you invisible, says Meg of your silence, folded around you for four months now. It’s the opposite. You and your mother are drawing attention. Meg inhales and wheezes. She sketches her trees bent over with their top branches growing like roots into the ground.
I imagine her peel the corners free,turn the image over,savor pen scratch, smile that smile that will bend meto the place I dream of going back to being.Betsy Turcot is one of my favourite poets around at the moment. Her ability to twist moments of perfect domesticity into moments of perfect prose is almost unparalleled. I got to see her read at the Riverbend Poetry Series a few weeks ago for the third time, and it was as magical as it always is. 3.5 is one of my favourites, but you can read a lot more over on her blog. Perfect Sunday reading.
High Tide from Kristin Kemper on Vimeo.
While I don't read or write a hell of a lot of fantasy at the moment, I think it'll always be my first love, my favourite genre, particularly when it's executed as beautifully as Sofia Samatar's Selkie Stories are for Losers. Her sense of character, loss and myth is so tenderly explored, her prose lush and the relationship that evolves between Mona and the unnamed narrator hits a reader right in the feels. I particularly loved the two mothers, and how their weaknesses and flaws were apart and removed, but so heavily informed the lives of their children. It's almost a perfect short story.Probably one of the biggest losers to fall in love with a selkie was the man who carried her skin around in his knapsack. He was so scared she'd find it that he took the skin with him everywhere, when he went fishing, when he went drinking in the town. Then one day he had a wonderful catch of fish. There were so many that he couldn't drag them all home in his net. He emptied his knapsack and filled it with fish, and he put the skin over his shoulder, and on his way up the road to his house, he dropped it."Gray in front and gray in back, 'tis the very thing I lack." That's what the man's wife said, when she found the skin. The man ran to catch her, he even kissed her even though she was already a seal, but she squirmed off down the road and flopped into the water. The man stood knee-deep in the chilly waves, stinking of fish, and cried. In selkie stories, kissing never solves anything. No transformation happens because of a kiss. No one loves you just because you love them. What kind of fairy tale is that?
