Best Canadian Stories 2020

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Once, eight years ago, late on a breezy spring afternoon, I was in the bath reading an anthology not unlike this one. This was during the brief period in my personal history where I owed several hundred thousand dollars on a clapboard house beside a freight railyard. The house, recently renovated in a dim, pretty, heritage-adjacent sort of way, was near the city centre and had a lilac bush in its yard, but was unlivable by local standards because it lacked a garage. The bathroom was the house’s sunniest room—the walls blue, the sky blue, the clawfoot tub new and plastic—and I’d tied back the curtains my mother had proudly sewn in order to better feel like I was happy.

I’d been infectious with an acute and inscrutable misery for several years, by that point, the onset traceable pretty much to the morning after signing the mortgage. “Only thirty-three more years of this,” I’d promise myself, as I walked the rescue dog through the gentrifying industrial park, spritzed diluted vinegar at baseboards, vacuumed gravel out of the car. The dog ate organic meat patties and rightly preferred my partner, who tenderly prepared them for her, to me.

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