It was hard to believe he could have missed this building from the parapet. He figured the door must lead to a space under the overpass, and the warehouse could be used to store excavating equipment. But in this recess of the warehouse all he could see was an arched entryway over a dirt floor. There was no machinery. His view to the right was blocked by an outcropping of wooden planks, and behind this blind corner men shouted curt instructions that lay somewhere between encouragement and orders. The fear of getting caught gripped Xavier. Site access was surely reserved for the demolition company and civil servants with clipboards and checklists. He nonetheless managed to take a few steps out of the sunbeam to see what lay beyond.
Five metres off, a few men were bent over wooden vats dug into the ground. They stirred the contents with poles and used long metal pincers to pull out what looked to Xavier like wet hides, saturated sheets which were then piled in heaps on a wooden wheelbarrow dripping with a viscous white liquid. The men’s dress—billowy blouses with rolled-up sleeves that had once been white, pants held up with suspenders, and crude boots—was both peculiar and too loose for their work, and their splattered, shiny leather aprons were clearly unequal to their task, as they were soaked. The men worked like dogs wrangling the revolting hides. When the youngest, slightest member of the crew, no older than thirteen, lost his grip on the tongs and dropped one of the hides onto the clay beside the wheelbarrow, a brute with abscess-covered arms and neck cursed and shoved him to the ground. Another few centimetres would have sent the youth into the tub. Xavier’s reflex to step forward was idiotic—he would have never dared try to reason with these men—but at that moment a cart came in, drawn slowly by a horse swarmed by flies, pulling a load of verdigris hides stacked like blankets and hanging with clumps of fur and chunks of bloody fat, tails, ears, and horned scalps. Two burly men left the tanks to receive it.
What a horse pulling a cart of cattle hides was doing in these ruins in Saint-Henri, Xavier couldn’t say, but his gut told him he had no business in this humid warehouse redolent with rotting carcasses, and that he’d made a mistake, and he should have just waited up above in his old car until traffic got moving again, so he turned back toward the heavy wooden door he had come in through, and when he yanked it toward him he found not Sarah but a rough tool shed with shelves full of unfamiliar implements reminiscent of medieval instruments of torture: pincers, curved-blade shears of black iron, bungs, knives, clamps, combs with outsized teeth, and mallets; the whole thing stank atrociously and made him salivate once more. He closed the door and opened it again, but nothing on the other side had changed. He went looking for the metal hatch with the fleur-de-lys, but everything he saw was made of wood. In a panic, he backed out of the corner, stood still, and saw that the cart had reached the part of the warehouse where the hides were unloaded onto trestles to be sheared of ears and tails by two Black men. Then they were tossed into a pile, while other men transported the trimmed hides in little wheelbarrows to a stream that flowed right through the warehouse. At the water’s edge, men with long double-sided cutlasses gathered up ever more skins, spread out onto easels to drain off thick, lumpy ooze which pooled onto the ground. A child came by with a scraper and pushed this molasses-like mixture back into the stream.
The husky man who had thrown the boy down earlier noticed Xavier and yelled out.
“Right, Étienne! About time! What’s you doing in that gear? In your togs now! We’ve got to fill the lime bath before Barsalou gets back from town.”
The man hesitated, slowed a little. Then he moved faster, and his voice rose a third.
“Mother of—that’s not Étienne—who are you, now?”
Xavier took off toward the open double doors the cart had come through. Outside there were no ruins, or piles of gravel or heavy machines, but a dirt road lined by rows of country cottages and pastureland dotted with grazing cattle; above there were no concrete pillars or interchange or helicopters, but a cloudless sky and pounding sun, and Xavier ran with no clear sense of direction, his knockoff Ray Bans tucked into his collar.
After trying to open the door, knocking, yelling, and just waiting for him to open, Sarah had given up. She was now halfway back up the ladder, hurling abuse at Xavier specifically and his entire generation in general. It’s not like things were better before. She didn’t give a shit about empty gestures of gallantry. But she’d always thought only true degenerates didn’t bother holding the door open for the ones who come after.
Metcalf-Rooke Award 2020
I am pleased to resume my sponsorship of the Metcalf-Rooke Award for the best Canadian short story in English after a hiatus of some years, and to present my cheque for this year’s winner, the unanimous choice of the judges, Kristyn Dunnion’s “Daughter of Cups.” It is a tough, disturbing, pitch perfect story of life in the slow lane on the shore of Lake Erie. My congratulations to Ms Dunnion.
In the tradition of Comments of the Judges:
Hey Leon, hey, Leon. Have you had a chance to read through that Best 2020 stuff yet?
Mmm-hmm. How ya doin’?
Fine.
That neck—thing?
And your knee?
So who…?
Well, there’s nothing to talk about, is there?
Right, precisely. That is precisely what I thought.
We are talking about the same story?
That Ohio girl.
She’s the one. Live to ride, ride to live.
Contributors’ Biographies
Maxime Raymond Bock was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1981. After pursuing studies in sports, music, and literature, he published four books of fiction, of which two, Atavismes (Atavisms, Dalkey Archive, 2015), and Des lames de pierre (Baloney, Coach House, 2016), were translated into English by Pablo Strauss. His latest collection of short fiction, Les noyades secondaires, was published with Cheval d’août éditeur (Montreal) in 2017.
Lynn Coady is the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of six books of fiction, including Hellgoing, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and was an Amazon.ca and Globe and Mail Best Book. She is also the author of The Antagonist, winner of the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction and a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her books have been published in the United Kingdom, United States, Holland, France, and Germany. Coady lives in Toronto and writes for television.
Kristyn Dunnion has published six books, including Stoop City and Tarry This Night. Dunnion earned a BA from McGill University and an MA from the University of Guelph. She has worked as a housing advocate to combat homelessness in marginalized communities. A queer punk performance artist and heavy metal bassist, Dunnion was raised in Essex County and now resides in Toronto. www.kristyndunnion.com