Read Online The Journey Prize Stories 24 by Various - Free Book Online Page B

was a kite hung up in the willow. An orange kite with red poppies and a crepe tail like a child would have. In the dark sky between the branches there were other things, too. Underwear and plastic bags, lottery tickets and soiled rags. Beer boxes and plastic ashtrays, relics from unhappy cupboards. Anything that wasn’t wanted elsewhere wound up here.
    Then in the soft mud by some caragana roots he spotted a set of footprints with the chevron pattern still stamped into the silt. The trail came out of the aspen grove and then meandered along the water, left by a small person who was not at all in a hurry.
    “Those are hers,” he said. “Those are her boots. I know them.I put them on her this morning. There’s a chunk of heel missing.”
    I got down on my knees. The harsh light fell across the track and on the right foot, and sure enough, the back half of the heel was gone, the rubber cracked and ragged. The trail of boot prints wandered through a cluster of reeds and with each step, they changed a little. The toes sharpened, the chevrons became scaly and the heels narrowed into claws. By the irrigation flue, the tracks were clustered in panic like a child hopelessly lost and knowing so and then they entered the river and were gone.
    “What do you see?” he said.
    “Nothing.”
    “You’re lying.”
    “A sign that says phosphates must not exceed ten parts per million.”
    “That’s not what I mean. You’re an expert on tracks. What do they say?”
    “These tracks aren’t new. They’re ancient.”
    “Stop that. I’m tired of hearing about your non-existent fossils. She’s been taken into the water right here,” he said. He waded into the river and ran back and forth like a dog that couldn’t decide where to cross.
    “She hasn’t gone into the water,” I said.
    By the mouth of an oxbow pond where the silt lay deep, a coil of barbwire ran from an old cattle fence and was fouled at mid-current. Trapped beneath the surface, a knot of hunchback clothes bobbled up and down, and because the fabric was pink, I pulled on the wire. The weight sank back. Not like a fighting fish. Not like a salmon or even the dead pull of a codfish, but a fiction that belonged on the river bottom forever. I remember once, as a boy, I went fishing in our boat with myfather and uncle. We were out on the deep saltwater and the rod bent down in an arc. My father and my uncle spent an hour reeling the cargo in, and then a bloated dark coil welled up to the surface and just as the limb touched the stern of the boat my father said, “Go inside.”
    Now my father and uncle are gone and this is a river, not the ocean. But out of the back eddy rose the drowned tangle of soaked wool and rubber boots. The body was small and childish, the limbs knotted in reeds, and the blonde hair strewn with petroleum from the very centre of the earth. Mutilated by the cattle wire, the skull had been stretched into a wedge and around the wrist there was still a string of brass bells.
    My neighbour threw his arms around the carcass and the head lobbed back. The eyes were baby blue, but the beak was triangular, and the arms scaly, reptilian wings.
    “My Angela,” he said.
    “What are you doing?”
    “She’s still breathing.”
    He put his mouth over the beak, exposed the red gums and razor teeth and blew until the meagre chest inflated. I grabbed him by the shoulder and struck him in the face.
    “Stop it.”
    “How can you say that?” There was blood on his lips and on the sand.
    “It is not your daughter.”
    I cut off the barbed coils with a pair of pliers. The wings flopped apart in an arc of crude oil. Rolled out, the span was six feet. The eye sockets were filled with vitreous humour that had soured in death and the claws on its feet had punctured the rubber boots like ivy grown through concrete.
    “We have to bury her,” he said. He kissed the leather jaw and did up the blue buttons on the dress. “We have to bury her and give her something