I am pleased to (belatedly) share the second runner-up for the 2025 Grouse Grind Lit Prize for V. Short Forms, Henry Osborne’s God’s County! This piece takes us on a journey past the end of the road, urging us to take a closer look.
God’s County
Here are the semi-trailer billboards which do not require
the permits regular billboards do. They are pushed,
ass-first and sidelong,
on the edges of the QE 2.
Catholic Credit Union – Flat Earth Canada – Rocky Mountain Rodeo.
Here are the roadkill jackrabbits
crushed into the pavement
opened to raspberry sherbet, to shiny gristle,
to be picked away by coyotes or flat shovel
by municipality road crew.
Here is a crow working a talon
inside fried chicken and onion rings. A dance
among yellow fast-food wrappers, among roaring trucks.
Black feathers glisten with grease you can smell:
hot fat and vinegar.
The turnoff for Ma-Me-O Beach and Winfield is where the wind
rushes through, where rusty matchbox Toyotas are
yanked across the median. This is the place
Blackfoot and Cree women are lost,
never found. Here, Harley Davidsons share billboards with pregnant silhouettes
screaming:
human from the start. Tinny and chaste, echoes of untilled fields,
of horses, of homesteads from the seventies.
Not far from the place
they were taken.
Henry Osborne is an emerging writer that specializes in weird, funny, violent, and romantic stories and poems. His writing has appeared in Broken Pencil, subTerrain Magazine, The Journal, and several small publications. His story about a woman falling in love with a lobster was shortlisted for The Fiddlehead’s 2022 Fiction Contest, but he is otherwise a writer of little to no recognition or importance. Born and raised on Vancouver Island, he currently lives in Montréal plying his trade as a schoolboy, dog-dad, and devoted househusband.