CROSS YOURSELF
by Lana Storey
Collected in FPQ Winter 2011
$0.99
Synopsis
Sometime after the incomprehensible death of his son, Joan Miró has settled into his new job working the overnight shift at a Hasty Market in Toronto. He has plenty of time to think beneath the fluorescent lights of the convenience store: of ghosts and late nights, of downtown living and dying, of customer service and self-preservation, of the beauty of the night sky, and of the attempts people make to connect with one another despite seemingly insurmountable distances. These fragments of life prove as difficult to make sense of as any code — until one night, when an extraordinary series of events suddenly teases a pattern from the dark.
Praise
“In this graceful, dark, and nuanced piece, Lana Storey reveals a private man unhinged by grief. These are events — and this a narrative—that will stay in my mind for a long time. Never one to shirk from difficult truths, Lana Storey writes in the tradition of George Saunders: an original, at times disturbing, but ultimately transformative worldview.”
—
Carolyn Smart, author of
Hooked: Seven Poems and
At the End of the Day
“
Cross Yourself is Lana Storey’s gorgeous swirling image constellation, a story about a man becoming unhinged from the universe and finding redemption in a downtown Hasty Market convenience store. A vibrant, beating heart of a short fiction,
Cross Yourself is a vortex worth being pulled into.”
—
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of the 2005 Amazon.ca/
Books in Canada First Novel Award finalist
The Nettle Spinner
Preview
At a Hasty Market downtown, an employee pulled a note out of his pocket and laid it on the counter. The note was in his ex-wife’s handwriting, and concerned his guilt in the death of their son. The note was addressed to Juan Alvarez, but when the man read those words, he saw his own name. Joan Miró was the name on his name tag, the one that nobody could pronounce. Joan didn’t know why Mirielle chose to write Juan Alvarez but he figured that the entire note was in some kind of code. It was like the cryptic messages in the Personals, and he just hadn’t figured out yet what it meant.
The note wasn’t new; it had been hanging on his bathroom mirror since Mirielle left him. Every day he stared at the words, and they never meant anything different. They always said, “You’re guilty.” But last night, something changed. The mirror broke, leaving the note as the only thing left for Joan to look at as he brushed his teeth and got ready for bed. It was no longer possible for his eyes to drift from the note to the reflection of his own face and back, giving the note meaning that Mirielle insisted wasn’t there. All he was left with were her words.
Last night, Joan read the note the whole way through, wrapped his bloody knuckles, and went to bed. The note haunted him, filling his mind while he slept. There were no images or words, no clear meaning — just a new feeling that he hadn’t had before.
