Paddle To Canada by Heather Monley, 2015
The magic trick:
Showing how memory can be used as medicine
H is for Heather.
If I had to pick a favorite short story subject, it would probably be memory and the way it changes and changes us over time.
So believe me when I say this story is most definitely in my wheelhouse.
I don’t even know what to write about it. It’s just about a perfect, tight little story. Trying to point out the good parts seems futile, there being no bad parts. Even worse than writing about it would be you, reading something about it before reading the story itself. So, if you haven’t read it, please leave this dumb SSMT website and do yourself a favor. Here is the link: https://lithub.com/paddle-to-canada/
If you’re still here, I guess I really like the way it shows its hand coyly at first. Before I realized that it was a story about altering memory to suit the present, I sensed something was a little off. The narration is very detached. The father did this. His children did that. It’s third person in the extreme, as if careful to assert its unbiased authority.
Which, of course, makes sense as you read further into the story.
And that’s quite a trick on Monley’s part.
The selection:
Because they had survived, it all became something to laugh about: the father pedaling so hard his face was red, the mother unable to keep up, and the boat turning in circles. The mother yelling to slow down, the father yelling to speed up, the kids splashing water in the back, the father yelling that they should stop splashing and hold on, because the last thing they needed was the kids to fall in the lake. Then, at the boathouse the next day, the angry manager—a bald man, their father said, with a patchy moustache—complaining they had left the life jackets in the boat where anyone could have stolen them, as if anyone would want a set of waterlogged life jackets scrawled with the name of the park in permanent ink.
Their father even laughed at the very idea the boat rental required a deposit. “What do they think we’re going to do?” he said. “Paddle to Canada?”
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