Trent Lewin has made the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize shortlist for Ghostworlds.

He will receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and his work has been published on CBC Books.

The winner of the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize will be announced April 17. They will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and their work will be published on CBC Books.

This year's jury is composed of Conor Kerr, Kudakwashe Rutendo and Michael Christie. The jury selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from the longlist, which is chosen by a reading committee of writers and editors from across the country. Submissions are judged anonymously on the basis of the participant's use of language, originality of subject and writing style.

For more on how the judging for the CBC Literary Prizes works, visit the FAQ page.

If you're interested in other CBC Literary Prizes, the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is currently accepting submissions. You can submit an original, unpublished poem or collection of poems from April 1-June 1.

Trent Lewin is a writer of East Indian origin, an immigrant to Canada and a climate advocate, who has been published by Boulevard, december, Grain, FreeFall and Ex-Puritan. He has also been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Lewin is hard at work on two novels and numerous short stories, all of which seek to blend the literary across a variety of genres. He has a background in education and engineering/science and lives in Waterloo, Ont.

In 2014, Lewin was a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize for his story Saad Steps Out. More recently, he made the CBC Short Story Prize longlist in 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Lewin shared with CBC Books what inspired him to write Ghostworlds: "There is a theory that we don't encounter life from other planets because the beings there have created false realities in which they find a better existence than their real ones. Virtual worlds that are expansive and joyous and that draw them in, so that they don't have to deal with reality and thus never push outwards. I often wonder if we are heading on that track too, caught up in digital worlds rather than real ones, always looking for alternate realities to the one in which we live. I find that a bit disheartening but also a source of hope if we can harness that power in a positive way. I feel like we cling to those virtual worlds over Ontario winters, when we seldom see our own neighbours!

"This story pulled at me early on, but I rewrote it several times to find a way to bring a fairly complex message to life. It's one of those stories that I know I wanted to tell but went through many iterations to get to a point where it resonated with me. I remember having a fun moment in a coffee shop where I felt that it had finally landed and knew right away that I wanted to share it. Having been shortlisted and longlisted by the CBC before, it just felt like the type of story that would resonate."

I am sure, this time, that you will eat the inside of the samosa, too. The fried shell is gone, and you are looking at the ketchup bottle as though you will only eat the peas, the potatoes, the cumin seeds, if they are in a whirlpool of red sauce.

"Anything else?" asks the waitress, in English. She doesn't even try to use Punjabi on me. White shirt, hair in a bun, dark like me. Dark and Indian. She looks at my child. "He's so fair."

You don't look at her, as you eat some of the samosa and make a face.

When Emily was with us, people understood how this could happen, this mixing of colour to make a Beige child. You push aside the plate with its hillside of naked samosa surrounded by a moat of ketchup. The waitress shakes her head.

We drive the long way home. There is a farm on the edge of town that grows trees. At the top of the driveway is a desk.

"Look," you say.

We pull over. The desk is red. Scratches in the surface.

"Must be free," you say, looking around.

Our car is a hatchback. We open the back, pull down the seats. We lift. When we get to the car, I hop in and pull. You open your mouth like a triangle and push.

At home, you go to your room because there are friends you need to talk to about something important. I sit on a folding chair in front of the desk. Out the window, there are tomatoes. One sunflower. I watch bees flit through the sanctuary we have planted for them, positive that I have done a good thing for the world.

#

Emily, to the surprise of everyone, married a Brown man in a field as people in shorts and t-shirts celebrated. I used to stare at inter-racial couples, wondering where they found the courage; after we were married, I watched us in the mirror as we brushed our teeth, and wondered who has seen the wind.

Before you were born, she liked to go to an Indian store to buy clothes. Jasjot Cloth House. Through the aisles, she browsed. An old man in a purple turban, a dressmaker, talked with her, and they became friends. The dressmaker was the only person Emily would go to at the store; and he would come to her the moment she showed up, as I lingered near the windows, the Indian boy with the white wife. Bolts of fabric of different colours stuck out of the wall. Dresses glimmering like stardust hung from the ceiling, and at the front, a glass case of shiny bangles shone like windshields in a parking lot, the sun overhead, rainbows in my eyes.

To the delight of the dressmaker, we had you. At first, we weren't sure you were okay, but the doctors said you were, and eventually the teachers agreed. You are such a sweet kid, the people at school said. Always helping classmates. Emily dear, I used to say, we made a Beige human being, a skin colour that is different from ours but not exactly in-between either.

Stop thinking about that, Emily said to me. She can no longer remind me of this, though.

She took you to meet the dressmaker, and the three of you would drink tea on the glass case with the bangles, as I stood by the front window. Sometimes, I would go next door to the little restaurant, order daal, and eat it like soup, as a Punjabi man watched me from the counter. Hey yaar, I heard him say in my head, that's not the way you eat that.

Emily grew tentacles in a hospital bed. One more arm each time we went to visit her. You would curl up on the bed with her, until one day, the bed was empty.

#

You tell me your friends are coming over, is there something I need to do tomorrow evening? Friday evening, when I have nothing to do except be with you. I tell you yes, I have something to do.

I go to the mall. The long aisles broaden, contract, as I walk in circles. I eat a cinnamon bun, and a woman across from me eats alone, too. We sit at separate tables and eat alone. When she's finished, she hopes that I have a good day. I say the same, because that is what is done in these days of the mall.

At home, the friends are gone.

"One problem," you tell me. In the room next to the tomatoes and the bees, you point at the desk. "That drawer is locked."

"No," I tell you, but you're right. The top left drawer won't open. There is a lock on the side. Was there a key, we wonder? But we don't remember one. We try a screwdriver. Then a hammer. But it won't open.

"What did we put in there?" I ask.

"Don't remember. What if it's something important?"

That night, after you're asleep, I try again. This time, I use tweezers, because the world that lives online told me to. I am on the rug under the desk, with a headlamp, a pillow under my hip.

In the other drawers, there are packs of paper, pens and alligator clips, a stapler, and file folders. But in that small drawer at the top left? What did we put in there, after we came home from the tree farm that day?

I'm there for an hour. You're sleeping, but I don't know if I can close my eyes. What's in the drawer, I ask the evening sky? What did we leave in there?

#

"Is he yours?" asks a teacher, as you talk to a friend.

Banners hang from the ceiling of the library. A red alarm bell above the door looks like it would scream if I threw a book at it.

"He's my son."

"Adopted?" asks the man.

I tell him the name of my wife. He says that he remembers her, and that it's great to meet me, and that you're a wonderful child, so considerate.

You take me to the geography classroom, and we stare at a map of the world, post-it notes on the north and south pole saying 'population zero.'

"Did you know that there will be ten billion people on the planet by 2050?" you ask me.

When I was young, we were sure that there would be far too many people on the planet. We would run out of food and water, and we would wreck everything, but the truth is, we're not growing as fast as we used to. We are slowing. There are ten billion reasons we are together, I tell you, don't worry about these things you can't control.

So serious, you tell me okay. Seven months later, you sit at the table with your arms crossed, and inform me of a Finnian that you knew, used to know, talked to so much in the high school corridors, but this Finnian is a Finnian no more. Just a memory, due to be buried in three days. Was Emily also buried like that, you ask me? You were there, I return, and give you a hug for as long as you need.

"He said there were too many people in the world, so he left," you say.

He left. I stand with you at the funeral. I hold your hand on the way back to the car. At home, you close the door and sit at the computer, talking to your friends as you play a game where you shoot everyone in sight. I know it's not anger, I know it's not a sign of anything, but that night, you stay on until three in the morning. I can hear your voice down the hallway. You laugh, you're angry, you're disappointed, you're so many things that I don't recognize.

#

There is a world in-between worlds. It's a ghostworld and it's not real except that it's the place so many go. In the universe, civilizations come and go bust, and out there, Emily and the dressmaker are dancing on the lips of a supernova, surveying civilizations that have retracted into their ghostworlds because in those places, everything is safe. In ghostworlds, you are not you and I am not me, and these people interacting with us may live next door or on the North Pole, we're not sure.

You come home from school and go to that world. You seep into and emerge from that world. There are people that you speak with, and I ask who they are. Neighborhood friends? People from high school? Or other? As if I wouldn't be careful, you tell me. We're young people, you say, and this is what we do. This is where we go.

Sitting on the folding chair in front of the red desk, I wonder where my ghostworld is.

The next year, you tell me, "I'm not going to university." As if I didn't already know. You've done well enough to get in. They might even give you money to supplement the dollars I've saved. "I'm going to help the world instead."

I am going to help instead, I think to myself in the garden that night. I am surrounded by failing tomatoes and dry grass, and a tree whose branches I take down five-at-a-time every year. In the darkness, we are alone, as a universe of a billion civilizations hangs over our head, each deep in their ghostworlds. No wonder… No wonder we don't hear from them.

Through the window, I can hear you talking to your friends. It's one in the morning, and you are happy and so far away, the hope of my remaining life. In 2050, I will be this old… and you will still be young. I will pretend to understand what you are saying to me, because that is what a parent should do. I will show empathy, because that is a word that I learned once, in the fucking horror of high school, from a book written when people struggled just to survive. Today, we are here, me in the garden, you in that universe, and Emily even further away.

#

There is a world in-between worlds. It comes in a bottle. It comes in a pill. And it sits in the darkness of a closet downstairs, full of Indian dresses that no one will wear again.

"Don't worry about me," you tell me, at the airport.

You write. Emails flutter, with photos of baked rock and tiny streams. You are building water towers. You are supervising the construction of irrigation channels.

You meet a woman in Sudan. She is Black, and you are Beige, and that makes you laugh but I am not laughing. In the photo, I wonder at how different you look from each other, and then go to the mirror and stare, and tell myself to stop it, stop it, stop it. I used to stare at inter-racial couples, wondering how they found the courage. I stopped wondering when Emily came, but she can't remind me of this now.

There is a world in-between worlds. There are bolts of cloth sticking out of the walls and pre-made dresses in plastic bags in mail slots. I walk the aisles, and twice a woman asks me if I need help. A photo of the dressmaker with a wreath around the frame hangs behind the bangle counter. There is a one hundred rupee note tucked in the lower corner. Are you with her, I want to ask him? I find a chair in the back corner of the shop. Silk and cotton brush against me, the air still, so foreign, so Indian. They tell me later that I must leave.

A woman in a green lehengha shows me out and watches me get in my car. Her arms are crossed as she stares.

#

At home, the house is too big for one person. I don't need such a large space, it's a waste.

I get my tools and get under the desk. There are more scratches now, but it's held up. In one drawer, there are chargers and thumbtacks, a bottle of dry-erase cleaner. A packet of gum. In another, there are five different colours of paper, and a white pad of printer stock. And two erasers shaped like hearts, pencil marks on their faces, the scribbles laughing that they could exist on such a surface.

I put a pillow under my hip. Lying there, I ache. The first attempt is a lock-picking kit I bought on-line, the reviews assuring me that it can open any lock. But it doesn't work.

There is a drill I bought five years ago, when you were still here. It's a plug-in drill because that has more power than a rechargeable one. It can go through anything. I have a round, clawed bit meant to make big holes, and put it on.

The window is open. Anyone outside can hear me chewing through the red wood around the lock.

The drill drives deeper. I push, until the bit hums with heat. It gets through. I withdraw the drill, pull out the lock. Defeated, it looks sad. It's held up for ten years, glancing against my leg as I sat at the desk and stared at a screen.

I look through the hole, into the drawer. It's dark in there. There's a smell percolating through the gap, like this is an ancient cave that's been opened after millennia. It's a different place. A reality that was hidden. A ghostworld. A place I can go.

I get up. Outside, the bees are sleeping.

I open the drawer and let the air in.

It's two in the morning. Where are you? I want to meet this girl from Sudan. I'm okay with whatever you do, whoever you want to spend your time with. Tell me that you're okay. Tell me what you are doing. Are you writing to say that you miss me, and that you want to come home? That it's time? Come back, even if it's for a short while. I want to take you to a place Emily loved. There's a picture of the dressmaker there. They were friends. You might even remember it, because she took you there all the time. You might remember him.

Guess what? I got that drawer open. In the middle of the night, using a drill. It's open right now, the first time in ten years, and I'm looking at the things that we left in there. The things that we never missed or even remembered. The things that have been with us all that time, even though we couldn't see them. Come home. Come back, and I'll show you what I found.

The winner of the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and their work will be published on CBC Books. 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 other CBC Literary Prizes, the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is currently accepting submissions. The 2026 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2026 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January.