Old Bones by Kate Gunn
2024 CBC Short Story Prize winner
Kate Gunn has won the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize for Old Bones.
She will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, attend a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and her work has been published on CBC Books.
If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize is open for submissions until June 1. The 2025 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January.
Kate Gunn grew up on Galiano Island off the west coast of British Columbia. She currently lives and works in Vancouver. Her short fiction has previously appeared in Prism International and the Antigonish Review.
Gunn told CBC Books that her inspiration for writing Old Bones came from her family's experience: "I wrote this story as a way to honour and understand the experiences of the women in my family who have experienced medical trauma. I also wanted to explore how these experiences replicate and transform over generations.
"I was previously longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize in 2019 for Red Sails, a story about my grandmother's journey from Scotland to Canada in the 1950s. This year's submission is another piece of that story, told from a different perspective."
You can read Old Bones below.
When my mother was thirteen she spent a year chained to a bed in a hospital. It started because my grandmother noticed that she was limping. Not badly, but consistently. It took her just a little longer than her sisters to get home from the store. Sometimes my grandmother saw her lean against a doorframe when she thought no one was looking and press her hands against the small of her back.
My grandmother took her to the hospital on Bathurst. It was August, and the tufts of dry grass pushed up yellow and bristling from between the cracks in the sidewalk outside the hospital entrance. Inside the air was sticky. They sat on brown vinyl chairs and waited for the doctor for what seemed like a long time. A fan hummed in the corner, lifting the limp tentacles of the spider plant that hung from the ceiling in a white plastic pot.
The doctors thought that my mother had a bone infection. She was admitted and put in isolation that same day. That is how my mother described it to me: isolation. Like it is a literal place, like the beach or the park. In fact, she did not have a bone infection but the doctors did not know that at the time, and so they commenced a series of tests that went on the better part of the year. The tests involved surgeries for no good end and holding my mother pinned to the hospital bed in traction (like isolation – also a place to be avoided). Without warning at night orderlies came to the bed and bundled her into a wheelchair. They pushed her through the byzantine hallways underground at the hospital for X-rays. When it was time for surgery they took her down on a bed with her wrists strapped to the metal railings and the lights flashing over her face. The doctors talked about her hip bone like they were archaeologists on the verge of a momentous discovery. Your daughter, they told my grandmother, is medically interesting.
Throughout this year my grandmother came to the hospital every day. She wore her nicer dress, this being the sixties. My mother would have been going into eighth grade, and so my grandmother brought books and paper from her teacher, Mrs. Whittaker. She told her the daily news of her sisters and her father and the dog. She brought dinner, sometimes, cold meatloaf covered in condensed cream of mushroom soup or porkchops baked in consommé. My grandmother sat on the blue visitor's chair in the corner and passed these foods to my mother while she lay in bed propped on the pillows. At the hospital my mother always ate in bed, even though she was perfectly healthy, aside from her hip.
Everyday, my mother asked when she could come home. She begged my grandmother to take her home, right now, that very night. My grandmother laid the back of her hand on her daughter's forehead, as though she might have a fever. She had to leave to put dinner on the table at home for my grandfather, to clean up and get the other children into the bath. She took the sun home with her when she left. That's how my mother explained it to me, later. Then she lay in the semi-darkness listening to the hum of machines and the slap-slapping of the nurses' shoes on the linoleum, and waited.
The hip almost made my mother exceptional. What the doctors eventually discovered was that the ball (there is probably some other, technical term for this) of the femur was too close to the socket. Apparently only one other person had been diagnosed with this particular condition before. I don't believe it had a name. Once the doctors came to this conclusion, the tests ended.
They discharged my mother without ceremony, eleven months after she was admitted, just let her out into the bright sunlight. She walked across the lawn holding her mother's hand, the bones beneath her skin exactly the same as they were before.
All through that year in the hospital, my mother had a small area inside herself that she kept for dangerous wishes. She wanted to be a cowboy, or a roadie, or a long-haul trucker. She wanted to smell dust and horses and feel the hollow thud of hooves in the dirt. She read a story about a vagabond and dreamed of freight trains made of shivering metal, of climbing aboard alone in the middle of the night. She kept that space inside her long after the tests were over and she grew up and had babies who became children, one of whom was me.
Despite that year in the hospital, and the doctors and the flashing lights, I believe my mother loved her hip. I believe this because she refused to get surgery for many years, right up until she herself was in her sixties. The hip must outlive the owner, she told me as a child, explaining the decision to defer surgery. Only later, when hip surgery became so common that it seemed that most of her friends had acquired new, artificial hips did this excuse begin to sound thin. By then she was old enough that she probably would have outlived the previous, destructible hip in any case.
And I believe my mother loved that part of herself because she paid dearly for it. She paid for it with pain. When I was little my mother washed the white tile floor in the kitchen with a mop every Friday. The mop was the kind with long grey string hair like the hair on the head of an old woman. But the thing about mopping a tile floor is that it gets wet and slick. Sometimes she slipped and when she did, her kneecap dislocated. It was because of the muscles in her hip, something about the alignment. She would scream and wrestle the bone back into place, lying on the tiles with both hands gripped around her knee. But she didn't have to mop the floor, at least not as often as she did. Or she could have been more careful. Maybe she'd run the numbers and decided, at that time, that it was the best risk available.
Later, when I was an adult, my mother became crippled with arthritis. It radiated out from the hip socket at the centre of her body, and over time she became more and more confined to her chair in the living room. It was never clear to me how much she could walk, if she really had to. Take the time, just a few years ago, when a bird flew in the living room window. My mother and I sat looking at it. An artifact from the forest was beating there on the floor. It was a western tanager, orange like a flame and unbelievably tropical. Then my mother got up out of her chair and ran out of house, really ran, even though she usually could barely shuffle to the bathroom.
I managed to coax the bird out of the house with the net we used to scoop algae from the pond, and it flew away. After, the house felt surprisingly quiet. It could be a cage or a jail. A prism from which could one never get out, even though you might beat your wings endlessly against the glass. Or you might be on the wrong side of the window, trapped inside the cage, and not even know it.
I asked my mother about it – not how she managed to run away from the bird, but why. Because it was in pain, she said, like it was obvious. It was in pain and I couldn't stand to look at it.
That night, I dreamed that I was sitting at my mother's kitchen table with a heavy silver knife and fork. I was eating the dead songbirds off a china plate with a blue ring. The plate was covered with iridescent magenta and crimson feathers. It was difficult, to maneuver the metal tines of the fork around to find the meat hidden between the tiny bones.
The problem with having a mother who is sick, or a mother who believes she is sick, is that you don't get to stop thinking of her as your mother. The memory comes back to me like it
never left. I am four and it is summer and the hummingbirds are buzzing at the feeder outside our window. There's one lying on the deck, stunned, silent. I go inside and ask my mother for a bowl of sugar water and then outside I force the bird's head down into the syrupy liquid until it dies. I don't mean to kill it, but looking at the death that I have caused, suddenly, is shocking. The power in my hands. And then I am a little girl again, with this terrifying, glistening piece of air in my palm, and I am running, running inside to show my mother, knowing with all my heart that she will fix it, and that it will fly again.
What my mother learned from her year in the hospital was how to be helpless, and then to be angry. There are ways to use both of those things together. I learned this about myself, after my first dead pregnancy. I went to the emergency ward at midnight, to wait for the needle in my thigh that would end the thing that was growing in the wrong place. You're so healthy, the doctors told me before they admitted me for surgery. You'll be just fine. You'll be pregnant again before you know it.
How disturbingly like cancer is any pregnancy, but especially that one. The multiplication of malignant cells, however much in my heart they coalesced into material that made my son and then my daughter, soft baby hair and outstretched arms. I sat for hours in the emergency room downtown. This was in the time of the opioid epidemic, and the hospital was filled with skeletons. The woman beside me was eating nacho chips with liquid cheese from a cardboard box. She had no teeth. The box spilled on the floor and she crawled under the chair to get them. Beside her a grey-haired man and woman knelt beside their adult son in a wheelchair. His eyes flickered. He's seizing, right now, the woman said. In the belly of the hospital a radiologist made stabbing motions with a tool in my belly to look for the cells. Sorry, he murmured when I grabbed the edge of the bed and twisted. Sorry, sorry.
At the hospital they chained me to the bed, too. Not literally of course, but they gave me an IV that pumped sugar into my body so that I didn't need to eat and little by little I became helpless and angry. I did want to eat, so badly. I could taste my mother's spaghetti. I could have killed for it. The woman in the bed next to me had been in a coma. She was lucky to be alive. She told everyone so, over and over again. I put a black scarf over my head to hide my face and turned to face the wall.
They took me down to surgery in the middle of the night. The lights flashed over my head. They laid me on a table with a bright white lamp overhead like I was going to be sucked into a spaceship. When I awoke the world was warm and soaked in yellow. I watched the dawn light seeping into the hospital room and thought of the tanager, of its orange feathers splayed out on the living room floor.
My mother only got hip replacement surgery once the arthritis became so bad that she fell when out shopping at the market and had to be hauled up off the floor by the cashier. Her leg was purple and we all thought she would be in a wheelchair, but then she did, surprisingly, go and get the hip extracted, like a rotten tooth. After the surgery, the doctor told her that it was the worst hip he had ever seen. He didn't explain what he meant by worst, but hearing it made her cry uncontrollably. Maybe it was the pain. She'd let the pain get on top of her because she wouldn't take the morphine and then she couldn't do anything but cry. I imagine that hip bone now, in a glass jar somewhere, a specimen, and it must be black and withered as a dead tree root. Perhaps doctors in white robes turn it around, exclaim over its grotesque and beautiful strangeness. More likely it's been burned up in the hospital incinerator, along with the dead cells that make up our hair and fingernails, our hearts, our would-be children.
Read the other finalists
- Lamentations by Miriam Ho Nga Wai (Toronto)
- How to Make a Friend by Zilla Jones (Winnipeg)
- The Baby by Kailash Srinivasan (North Vancouver, B.C.)
- Permission to Pause by Carley Thorne (Toronto)
About the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize
The winner of the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and attend a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.
If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize is currently open until June 1, 2024 at 4:59 p.m. ET. The 2025 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2025.
