The Journey Prize Stories 22 Read Online Free Page A

watching his large hands grip the steering wheel.
    The houses are now farther back from the road, separated by vast stretches of dark lawn. She can barely see his face.
    Of course, he will never own a house like this. These houses belong to pop stars and the Russian mob.
    Even now, he is frowning and pausing at a crossroad, turning his head side to side. “I don’t …” He wheels the car to the right.
    It slows to a stop.
    â€œOoops, dead end,” he says. He turns to face her.
    They are on a gravel road, surrounded by black shapes of pines. His headlights cast the only light. She looks at the uneven outline of his ridged skull, at the dark shadow of his face, at where she thinks his mouth should be.
    It’s him or me, she thinks. Him or me. Him or me.
    And I am willing.
    She smothers him with her mouth.
    She tongues the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple.
    She shoves her hand under his sweater and pinches his nipples.
    She pushes back his head with both hands, to expose his neck, and bites.
    Only when his hands begin to dig into her shoulders does she stop. He has made an X with his arms in front of his chest, palms facing outward, pushing her away.
    She grabs at his groin, but he swats away her hand and says, “I thought you were shy.”
    His voice is querulous and accusing, his breathing uneven. “I watched you at the club. You barely moved your hands or body when you spoke. You took up as little space as possible. Very shy people do that …”
    â€œYou profiled me?”
    â€œÂ â€¦â€¦or liars.”
    The adrenalin that rushed through her body a few minutes ago seems to have pooled in her stomach, leaving her legs and arms numb. She feels tired. No, exhausted. The heft of her disappointment and humiliation, surely, will capsize the car.
    â€œI have no idea how we’re going to get back,” he says, and she turns towards the windshield. The yellow arm of a barrier gate extends across the road in front of them.
    They are both lost. Lost in this suburb of designer homes. A dream of a dream she had when she was much younger.
    â€œI won’t hurt you,” she says. She remains still. She makes no sudden movements.
    â€œLiar,” he whispers.

ANDREW BODEN

CONFLUENCE OF SPOORS
    T he hunter followed the blood down from the North Shore Mountains into Vancouver. This was the third day he’d tracked the buck his father wounded but couldn’t kill, because a fall broke the old man’s femur. The hunter had never known a buck to bleed this much and go on. It should have bedded down and died two days ago, but here were drops of its blood on the white shoulder line of the Upper Levels Highway and, a mile on, a tuft of tawny hair caught on a chain-link fence. He crossed the Lions Gate Bridge at dusk and followed the blood trail east past Coal Harbour, down Cordova Street into the lower East Side. Twice his .30-06 leapt to his shoulder, but the crosshairs fell on the ghosts of old kills and he cursed his exhaustion, his hunger. His image of the wounded buck, blood staining its white belly, blood trickling down its pink-white thighs, blood loss lowering its head inch by inch, pushed him past the broken women who all smiled and asked if he wanted a date. He came to Powell and Raymur and the blood trail went north and east.
    He peered both ways through his scope: at the desolateparking lot of the sugar refinery; at the dark road east. “Where are you?” he hissed. He wanted to shoot off a couple of rounds, fucking have done with it. It had drizzled for two days and his wet mackinaw and wool shirt made him itch with cold. Hunger was making him see double, he concluded, but neither blood trail, north or east, vanished after he downed a handful of bread crumbs from his pocket.
    â€œWhere is she?”
    The hunter thought he imagined the voice, as he had imagined the branching bloody trails, but there was a woman now in a navy pea jacket beside