by Laura Boudreau

I liked the way Nate told the story. He was happy to reel it off, starting with the part where Genevieve, his first mother, collapsed on the kitchen floor with a blood clot in her lung. “It only took a second or two for her to die,” he said, slowly lowering his hand in a side-to-side motion as though his mother had been a piece of windblown paper. “She probably didn’t even feel it.” Nate was a baby when it happened, and he had almost cried himself to death by the time the landlord unlocked the apartment door. His father—our father—lived with my mother by then. The day Genevieve died, my mother was busy giving birth. “But don’t feel bad, Elaine,” Nate said to me. “You almost died, too. You were early.”

It seemed obvious to us that Genevieve’s death was a lot better than our father’s. It was definitely faster and there were no hospitals or operations, and Genevieve didn’t have to lose her hair or spend a lot of time throwing up into stainless-steel bowls. My mother agreed with us on principle, she said, catching our eyes in the rearview mirror, but either way it wasn’t appropriate to make a sport out of it. “Death isn’t a contest, you know. Everyone gets the same prize.” She lifted one hand from the steering wheel to make the point as we drove through the cemetery gates. Genevieve and our father were in different sections, but my mother said it was still very convenient for visiting, even if the traffic in this part of the city was hell.

Laura Boudreau’s short fiction has appeared in a variety of literary journals and publications, including Grain, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly and online at Joyland.ca (Toronto). She is a graduate of the Creative Writing Master’s Program at the University of Toronto. She currently makes her living as a freelance writer and editor.