Free The Journey Prize Stories 27 by Various Page A

the pub is getting too mouthy. “Hey sexy, give us a smile—smile you fucking bitch—are you waiting for the coffee beans to grow? Hey, girlie, I bet you can’t count to six. Them taking all our jobs: all those stupid fucking faggots and filthy foreigners.” The accidental alliteration makes them think they’ve said something clever, and they laugh. “How many fingers am I holding there, lassie?” One: he’s shoving his middle finger in my face. I walk away like I’m deaf. He pinches me on the ass. “Don’t do that!” I yell and they laugh.
    There are two girly-girls flirting with the table of hockey fans and they’re still holding their cocktails from the bar, just standing there in my section without a seat. One is chewing on the ends of her teased-up hair; she laughs at me. “Can I get a milkshake?” I have no idea if she’s serious. I have no idea how I’m going to get through this. My feet feel swollen; blisters rub against the insides of my shoes. I try to forget I have feet. I slip sideways out of myself for a moment and just try to feel whole again in a perfect split second of calm certainty. If you believe strongly enough in the weirdness of the universe, some goddess of the absurd might just come down and save your queer ass. And it happens.
    I open my eyes just in time to see Stacey-Jane in front of a toaster. Smoke is billowing out and little flames follow as she cremates the delicate, white Wonder Bread. She has a glass of water in one hand and a metal fork in the other. John is a moment behind her. Everything moves in slow motion as he lunges to pull out the toaster plug that moment too late. Almost simultaneously, she douses the toaster blaze andattacks the burnt offerings with her fork. Everyone in the room takes a collective gasp before the bang of the short circuit sends us into darkness. There is silence. For a second I think we might all be dead. “Sweet Baby Jesus!” blubbers out Stacey-Jane in the sexiest, trembling, most innocent sobbing voice that carries through the darkness.
    She throws her arms around me and we embrace in the dark as she weeps on my shoulder. And there in the darkness, she clutches me close. Her fingers reach around my front and she touches my breast, smoothing it with her palm, like it was the most natural thing to do right there in the righteous dark in the middle of a crowded restaurant after near-electrocution. Steve, flashlight in hand, finds the breaker panel and Stacey-Jane jumps back to earth as the fluorescent lights blind us momentarily. The magic moment is over, and Steve orders the bus boys out of the dish-room to clean up the mess.

ANDREW MA C DONALD
THE PERFECT MAN FOR MY HUSBAND
    T he news arrived with the fanfare of the last tiny float in a very small parade, the one nobody wants to see, the one that fell behind and never caught up. He told me he had cancer, the worst kind, and that it had spread to so many corners of his body that there wasn’t any hope. That got me. No hope. Who says that to his wife? We were having dinner, this was before he got really bad, sharing one of those little plates where they poured balsamic vinegar and olive oil, the vinegar slipping around in bubbles. The bread stick had been torn in half. I looked down and saw that it was in my hands.
    I put my piece of bread back on the plate and asked my husband, “What do you mean, no hope?”
    “Exactly what it sounds like.” He drank some carbonated water, sucking it through his teeth. By the face he made, I could tell he had trouble getting it down his throat, as if it hadn’t gone all the way to his stomach and had chosen his Adam’s apple as its home instead.
    This was our Cancer Dinner—what we’d call it over the next few months, when the endlessly multiplying cells really started ransacking his body. I would come to grow fond of this moment, the way Eve must have grown fond of the split second before she bit into the apple and damned us all. It’s rare in life