Ezra's Ghosts is a collection of imaginative stories set in a quiet prairie town called Ezra. Linked by place and themes of grief, language and culture, each story features a different character dealing with fantastical circumstances: one character is trapped in town following her death, forced to watch her family and killer continue on without her while another story sees the oldest man in town sprout wings.

It is one of five books shortlisted for the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Prize for Fiction. The $60,000 award recognizes the best novel or short story collection published in Canada. The winner will be announced on Nov. 2, 2022.

"There's an element of magic realism, or urban fantastical, in each of the four stories. But I would define it as more of a genre variable collection," Tamayose told CBC Books in an interview.

"It's a collection of four stories. I wanted to explore and experiment with storytelling pace, density and the nonlinear flow. With multiple pieces, multiple moving parts and being immersed in a liberal education system, I had a lot of things to draw upon. There's a lot of themes — that's probably why I like the short story format."

Tamayose is a writer and graphic designer from southern Alberta. Her other work includes the novel Odori and the YA book Katie Be Quiet.

You can read an excerpt from Ezra's Ghosts below.

I woke to a dark and still mid-morning.
The kind of dark and still that comes just before a rainstorm.
Then it did.
Rain, that is.

The rain came down like a cloud of a million slow spears. Needles cast long, fine filaments angling from the sky. Yes, it rains in this dimension just as it does down there. In fact, there isn't as much difference as one might think. One thing is apparent, however — time is different. Rain falls slowly, and with that one can observe the way the light embodies each strand, the way it impacts a puddle, quakes, and concentrically ripples. The action catches the light differently with each ripple. Time copes with colour differently, too, as amber and indigoes, for example, present in an unpredictable manner due to the nonlinear aspect. Colours? They linger and bleed. Time seems to slow the inhale of beauty — or what I perceive to be beauty. The stretch of sunlit rain, for instance, seems to hold in its seemingly small vessels stories that you have never heard, particle voyages that are multi-directional, carrying a cargo of riches you can't even imagine; and then when they fall, they touch my skin, my eyelids, my tongue.

This state seems to exceed any earthly fantasies of heaven. I am cloaked in the rain's sublime beauty as I become privy to the collective rain stories and the way they heal my glaring wounds.

***

I was privy to a deeper layer of those I had left behind. A part of them I couldn't know before. I could see bits and pieces of each of their private struggles, but some of their thoughts and memories were impenetrable. It scared me how much I truly didn't know about them. Humans wear masks. How much broader my misunderstandings and misperceptions now seemed. Most of the issues didn't seem to matter. But my perspective had changed. To them, they had shaped a lifetime of making the things that mattered to them complex. To me, I could see the world and the vast timeline of existence. I could see how each one of them was only a speck of dust in the grand scheme of things. When I lived down there, the small family with our creature comforts looked like a cohesive unit. From up here, my loved ones looked like a heap of repelling fragments.

I sat in the alcove of the tallest window of the library embracing the wreckage below. I watched them go about their lives, and I missed them. Their delicate shells clung to their cores only by virtue of habit.

***

Beneath the crimson swath of early morning pastoral, I saw the silhouette of my killer rise over the hillock. The intoxicating beauty of the land could make anything in creation look exquisite. On first sight he was the poster boy for all those mythic hero motifs. Classically sculpted, he portrayed a noble air, possessed squared shoulders, and held an assured stance. His thick hair was a tousle of chocolate brown and his eyes glistened like green jewels. It was impossible not to notice his outward spectacle. But first impressions fade, and it is hard for a human to conceal their inner workings for long. On matters societal, while Angler's circles seemed rich in diversity, they were in fact monochromatic. While he seemed charismatic and generous, something imperceptibly unsettling existed behind his smile. The truth of the matter: he was confined to a private island of one and within existed a powerful callow. No one ever came close enough to understand how effortless it was for him to slip into the dark coordinates of his world.

Angler Moss was returning to our home in Starling Glen from his Saturday morning communion with the vast spread of the coulees. It had been seven weeks since my death. Because they confidently had Butterfield in hand, the investigators never really pursued other possible suspects. It was evidently a classic open-and-shut case. Angler was clean off the hook.

He pondered the last year and considered how he would go forth with the rest of his life. Wipe the slate clean, he thought. His jealousy of Joseph Butterfield, his anger with me, all his transgressions — these were clearly the chief factors for the regression of his hostility. Angler thought he would be granted some semblance of salvation now. How he reconciled his fleeting noble thoughts with his past was a mystery.

To the Crow. In the eyes of fish.

Excerpt from Ezra's Ghosts by Darcy Tamayose. Published by NeWest Press. Copyright 2022 by Darcy Tamayose. Reprinted with permission.