Our “BAD” themed issue will be on stands soon, and includes work by some of Canada’s most talented and thought-provoking emerging writers. This issue is an invitation to reconsider our biases and values, and to test the limits of contemporary literature. In this issue, we’re featuring fiction by Sarah Christina Brown, a Concordia Creative Writing MA graduate whose work has appeared in Event, Room, Cosmonaut’s Avenue, The Dalhousie Review, and on the CBC Short Story Prize longlist. She now lives in New Westminster, BC. Of her story, “Land of Living Skies,” Brown says:
I wrote a first draft of this story for my thesis while in grad school. That collection is themed around place as a metaphor for the body or the personal. “Land of Living Skies” is set in Saskatchewan. I’ve always liked that nickname for the province, and I was reading about the Langenburg, Saskatchewan UFO case in the seventies. In my earliest draft, a young woman becomes fixated on crop circles found on her farm, but she is misdiagnosed with a mental illness due to this. It was an okay story, but I felt it could be developed further.
As I revised it, I realized the core conflict of the story is belief—who believes or disbelieves whom and why. I also began thinking about the rise of alien culture in the fifties and sixties, and how there was an invigorated, Hollywood-generated interest in belief at that time. I rewrote the story during the #MeToo movement, and I began thinking about the parallels between these two times. In the revision, the imagery of aliens and invasion is connected to sexual assault. The story is set in a pre-internet era, and I did have trouble with some anachronisms, but ultimately my protagonist is struggling to learn a new vocabulary for things she’s experienced, so I felt we shared the same stumbling points over language, if that makes sense.
I worried at first about the somewhat campy nature of aliens, but I tend to gravitate towards weirdness rather than strict realism, and I think the ridiculous can still hold metaphoric weight. One of my earliest influences was Kurt Vonnegut. He manages to make giant, difficult topics accessible through sci-fi or satire. Recently I came across a beautifully-written essay by Nancy Hightower on Joyland, where she connects Vonnegut’s “unstuck” time to the detachment that accompanies memories of trauma. I want to learn from the way he dismisses traditional aspects of fiction and instead creates a narrative structure that is unique to the story’s conflict, that seems designed specifically for it. I also like that Vonnegut makes his intentions—his humanism and his social criticism—quite transparent. As fiction writers we’re taught to bury ourselves and let our characters carry the story, but I’ve grown fond of those moments where you can see the author shine through.
Land of Living Skies
(an excerpt)
They were in the papers, on the radio. These girls who, red-faced, with a hardness in their throats, talked about their encounters. Sometimes there were older women too, recounting the sightings they’d once had, but these women were easier to write off because time could cloud their judgment. It was happening everywhere on the continent—in Canada, in California, on tundras, on islands.
People would talk about it on the subway, on the streets. “Did you hear about the latest?” they’d whisper, shifting. I tried not to pay too much attention, but then things began happening in Saskatchewan —the place with a snatched name, the Cree syllables for swift-flowing river whittled down. Radio announcers described the crop circles which had appeared in the yellow fields of durum wheat.
Soon girls were calling in reports on a global scale. Aliens were appearing in their rooms, were leaving wet trails of slime on their skirts. The stories kept coming. It was a new psychological phenomenon, a new hysteria on the horizon.
I was far away from the prairie by then. I had moved to the big city and I was working in
broadcast television as a news anchor. Men liked to tell me I looked classy, even when I was mouthing their cocks. My big-city men would compare me to actresses from Hollywood’s golden era and I got the sense that this was a high compliment. Those women never saw aliens, or if they did they kept it to themselves.
My boss, Dennis, was a buoyant man who subsisted on takeout sandwiches and visions of grandeur for the channel. He had hired me because I was well-spoken, “with good angles,” he’d said. I didn’t question him on it, because truthfully I wasn’t quite qualified for the job. But I’d learned quickly enough. Camera left, camera right, cold copy. I was doing fine until he asked me to cover the story. Another crop circle had appeared. There was a cutting edge, an edge to be cut, and we could be close to it.
“Didn’t you grow up there?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I said, “but to tell you the truth, I barely remember anything at all.”
It was a lie, but really, I tried not to think about it too often. I knew it couldn’t be much different than anywhere else, but everything was flat there, so it was harder to hide things. Even the sun had nowhere to go, so it spilled down every night like hot lava, like something Martian. And people like to talk in small towns. I’d worked as a waitress at this diner that served all-night milkshakes. Seventy-two flavours and all of them tasted like soap. We were half-sleeping on our midnight-to-morning shift, the air thick with deep-fryer grease, when Beth, folding her arms across her apron, whispered to me. “My boyfriend,” she said, “my boyfriend, he turned into one right in front of me.” She’d seen his eyes recede into hollows, his mouth into a hole. “Annie,” she said, “in my bed.”
We were silent. She bit her lip. Her boyfriend’s family owned the province’s biggest potash mine, and a lot of people loved him, and they would not like it if she called him an alien. Even the idea, as a joke, would be obscene.
“Should I tell someone?” Her eyes were red, although all of our eyes were red on the night shift. We got so tired. “They’ll think I’m crazy.”
“I don’t know,” I said, and though I felt badly about it, I shifted back on my stool. “I mean, are you sure? Was it dark? Maybe you, I mean, could it have been part of a dream?”
Historically, the world had not been good to those who had reported encounters. There was a time when people who saw aliens would be taken away in straightjackets and never seen again. Nowadays society was more liberal, with free speech built into the status quo, but the memories still lingered.
“I mean, I thought I was sure. But maybe. The dark. God, I don’t know.”
A drunk man came through the front door and demanded a chocolate-cherry-
marshmallow. The conversation was over. I never brought it up again, and as far as I know, she never told anyone else about what happened.
At work, in what felt like punishment for my passing on the alien story, Dennis assigned me the general-interest segment. It was the last time slot of the hour, and I was meant to interview successful people about their jobs. The majority of these successful people were men. I held microphones out for them. Before the interviews I read dozens of encyclopedic entries on stocks and bonds, science, sports. I had to be very careful about what I said, because the slightest slip would mean I wasn’t as smart as them. “How do you feel, Robert,” I asked a real estate agent in a crisp suit. “How do you feel about interest rates increasing by two point five percent?”