We’re back with another Valentine’s Day round-up, and this year, we’re featuring some of our favourite short stories. While readers are used to stories of romance on this holiday, these stories tell tales of love in all its forms – familial love, friendship, self-love, with maybe just a dash of romance, if you know where to look. Below, you’ll discover excerpts from stories that highlight love in its many unexpected forms, shared by diverse voices. Happy Valentine’s Day.
Borders
Thomas King
“‘Where you heading?’
‘Salt Lake City.’
‘Purpose of your visit?’
‘Visit my daughter.’
‘Citizenship?’
‘Blackfoot,’ my mother told him.
‘Ma’am?’
‘Blackfoot,’ my mother repeated.
‘Canadian?’
‘Blackfoot.’
It would have been easier if my mother had just said “Canadian” and been done with it, but I could see she wasn’t going to do that.”
The Paper Menagerie
Kevin Lui
“‘Kan,’ she said. ‘Laohu.’ Look, a tiger. She put her hands down on the table and let go. A little paper tiger stood on the table, the size of two fists placed together. The skin of the tiger was the pattern on the wrapping paper, white background with red candy canes and green Christmas trees.
I reached out to Mom’s creation. Its tail twitched, and it pounced playfully at my finger. ‘Rawrr-sa,’ it growled, the sound somewhere between a cat and rustling newspapers. I laughed, startled, and stroked its back with my index finger. The paper tiger vibrated under my finger, purring. ‘Zhe jiao zhezhi,‘ Mom said. This is called origami.
I didn’t know this at the time, but Mom’s breath was special. She breathed into her paper animals so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with her life. This was her magic.”
All the People Were Mean and Bad
Lucy Caldwell
“But your bags, and the buggy, he says, how will you manage?
People are helpful, you say, they’ve been so helpful, every bit of the way – and it’s true, you realise in a rush, thinking of the taxi driver who found you a trolley, wheeled your bags into the terminal, right up to the Air Canada desk; of Chantal, who upgraded you to premium economy for free, so you and Tilly would have a bit more room. Her long nails, midnight-blue with crystals, tapping, and how, in an attempt to give her something back, you’d said how you admired them, offering up your own short, bitten fingernails, and how she’d beamed. Of the people around you who didn’t roll their eyes or glare at you as Tilly howled; and him, of course; and him – and suddenly, you find yourself on the verge of all the tears you haven’t yet cried.
Oh, he says, oh, and he says, Come here, and he takes your face in both his hands and brushes away the tears with his thumbs, and then there’s a moment, and everything tilts.
Heathrow Arrivals resolves itself back around you. There is an artist whose work you saw once in a Whitechapel gallery: she had stitched to a globe of the world metallic threads representing one single day’s flights, then somehow dissolved the globe, leaving just the sugar-spun mass of threads, and you think of it now, of how it made you think, how fine the threads that connect us from one person, or place, to another, and how precious, and how strong.
I have to go, you say, because if you stay for a moment longer, you won’t; or won’t be able to.”
How to Talk to Girls At Parties
Neil Gaiman
“‘Would you like to hear it?’ she asked, and I nodded, unsure what she was offering me, but certain that I needed anything she was willing to give me.
She began to whisper something in my ear. It’s the strangest thing about poetry — you can tell it’s poetry, even if you don’t speak the language. You can hear Homer’s Greek without understanding a word, and you still know it’s poetry. I’ve heard Polish poetry, and Inuit poetry, and I knew what it was without knowing. Her whisper was like that. I didn’t know the language, but her words washed through me, perfect, and in my mind’s eye I saw towers of glass and diamond; and people with eyes of the palest green; and, unstoppable, beneath every syllable, I could feel the relentless advance of the ocean.
Perhaps I kissed her properly. I don’t remember. I know I wanted to.”
My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn
Sandra Cisneros
“When I get home Abuelita will say Didn’t I tell you? and I’ll get it because I was supposed to wear this dress again tomorrow. But first I’m going to jump off an old pissy mattress in the Anguiano yard. I’m going to scratch your mosquito bites, Lucy, so they’ll itch you, then put Mercurrochrome smiley faces on them. We’re going to trade shoes and wear them on our hands. We’re going to walk over to Janey Ortiz’s house and say We’re never ever going to be your friend again forever! We’re going to run home backwards and we’re going to run home frontwards, look twice under the house where the rats hide and I’ll stick one foot in there because you dared me, sky so blue and heave inside those white clouds. I’m going to peel a scab from my knee and eat it, sneeze on the cat, give you three M & M’s I’ve been saving for you since yesterday, comb your hair with my fingers and braid it into teeny-tiny braids real pretty. We’re going to wave to a lady we don’t know on the bus. Hello! I’m going to somersault on the rail of the front porch even though my chones show. And cut paper dolls we draw ourselves, and color in their clothes with crayons, my arm around your neck.
And when we look at each other, our arms gummy from an orange Popsicle we split, we could be sisters, right? We could be, you and me waiting for our teeths to fall and money. You laughing something into my ear that tickles, and me going Ha Ha Ha Ha. Her and me, my Lucy friend who smells like corn.”
If poetry’s more your thing and you’re looking for a love poem or two this Valentine’s, you can find our round-ups from previous years, here, here, or even here.
Happy love day.
