Love is the Enemy by Vincent Anioke
The Waterloo, Ont.-based writer is on the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize shortlist
Vincent Anioke has made the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize shortlist for Love is the Enemy.
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 You can submit an original, unpublished poem or collection of poems from April 1-June 1.
About Vincent Anioke
Vincent Anioke is a Nigerian Canadian writer and software engineer. His short stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Rumpus, The Masters Review and Passages North. He won the 2021 Austin Clarke Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the 2023 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
Perfect Little Angels, his debut short story collection, was released in 2024 and shortlisted for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize. CBC Books named Anioke as one of the 2024 writers to watch. He is currently working on a novel.
Anioke is no stranger to CBC Literary Prize success. His story Leave A Funny Message At The Beep was longlisted for the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize and his story Utopia was longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize twice, in 2021 and 2023.
Anioke shared with CBC Books the inspiration behind Love is the Enemy: "I was reflecting on the dual nature of love after an intense personal experience — how love can exert a pressure that runs counter to our beloved's soul, or body, or agency, or desires, arguably for better or worse. I saw the tendrils of that duality tangled up in all kinds of love that define our lives: parental, patriotic, romantic, religious — and became interested in a tightly woven story that explored and hyper-focused on these threads.
"The CBC Short Story Prize has been on my radar since 2021, and I was especially proud of this story, how it feels deeply Nigerian with its focus on roots and culture and tradition, deeply Canadian with its focus on migration and assimilation and redefinition and deeply universal with its themes on love, loss and belonging."
You can read Love is the Enemy below.
WARNING: This story contains vulgar language.
"All the love under this roof," Mama used to say. Funny. Between my parents and my five siblings and me, there was never any silence, a plate was always breaking, and I, the oldest, was always paying the price–a belt on the back, a bout of yelling that provoked warm, pink eyes. Of course, by similar effect, there were some prices we couldn't afford to pay. Nights out at nice restaurants were rare and constrained to one entree per head, Fanta bottle requests denied for glasses of tap water. We could never fly anywhere. I grew weary of the Lokoja highway on those endless summer road trips. Child hawkers smeared gala meat and Lucozade Boost against our half-wound windows. Dust from the unpaved grounds swirled in on low winds down our trachea, invoking Chisom's potty mouth. Second-born Chisom, wild and uncouth. He whistled when a movie camera lingered a second too long on a woman's bosom. The year I started looping Cyndi Lauper on my MP3 player, he called me a faggot. Half-joking, half-not, but he was right either way, the sentiments in that word shared by Mama and Papa and our church two streets away and the whole nation really, so I fled.
I suppose that's the word, however civilized the individual steps were: first-class honours in Electrical Engineering from the University of Lagos, a job offer from a tech startup in Toronto, and then my fleeing, nine thousand kilometers northwest. I traded abacha and jollof rice for poutine and pepperoni pizza, oven-temp pavements for snow angels, blood for loneliness, for the knowledge of my colour's skin–capital-B Black–and for so many tears. Finally, too, a new kind of freedom. I waved a rainbow flag down a parading sea of glitter-speckled limbs and danced in clubs where hungry eyes glinted above full beards, their gazes unwavering. No, the gazers drew close, offered long kisses in the dark, sweaty and exhilarating, and the next morning, they broke my heart. Texts unreplied, calls unanswered, the night's affairs constrained to the night. But can you desert your homeland and dare grieve your solitude?
Micah was my neighbour at the Brazilian cooking class on Yonge Street. He said my restraint mixed poorly with the bold flavour profiles the Moqueca demanded. He sprinkled his bottle of paprika atop the writhing stew. His boldness was an affront. Intoxicating, too. When he offered to show up at my apartment the next day, a cookbook in tow, I did not object. One day became five became fifty. He loved my ogbono. I loved the post-gym taste of him. Grocery store runs gained a thrill, and later a quiet peace, in lockstep with him. When I made my weekly Sunday calls back home, he lay on my chest, pulling at the hairs circling my belly button. He smiled when I said my "I love you"s in sequence: Mama first, then Papa, then Chisom and the rest. Chisom was the only one who never said, "I love you, too." Some things men just don't say. But the words found Micah's lips six months in, catching me off guard atop a New Jersey Ferris wheel. We'd driven there from Toronto, during which I learned that dust swirling from the roadside can indeed rise in an airy, weightless manner, lit snow-like by the sun's warmest gold.
"I love you, too," I replied, the words so easy.
"Where is she?" Mama often asked on those Sunday calls. She being the one being love personified being bearer of my grandchildren. Micah wanted four kids, and I wanted one, so she was guaranteed at least two-and-a-half. Micah and I had the surrogacy versus adoption debate the evening we conquered the harsh white plainness of my living room walls. Adoption, we decided as the framed pictures came together in the shape of a ladle: bowling alleys, the peak of Mont Tremblant, Puerto Vallarta resorts, a BLM protest, two hands linked in every shot. Micah's mother was a slight woman, the weight of pregnancy permanently damaging her knees, and we refused to put another through that. His father suffered from M.S. and neuropathic pain and was constrained to a wheelchair. Many nights Micah couldn't spend because he tended to his father, never minding his mother's protests that life was Micah's to fully experience. How luminous then, the moments we had. Whenever he was away, I treasured all the reminders of his existence. His clothes which took up the entire second row of my dresser. The spice racks he insisted every respectable man should have, pimenta de cheiro, chimichurri, cumin. His weed bong, which I sometimes smoked from, but never the right way because I always got a little bit of the dirty water in my throat. Three years passed in this warm space where what life is seems synonymous with all it will ever be. We stuck together through the good–my promotion to senior site reliability engineer, the staging of his folkloric play–and the bad–his father's hospitalization, death's grip looming close.
Strike, the Reaper did. Just not where we expected. Chisom's love of mobile games took him to Emab Plaza to fix his buggy iPad. That same evening, another man, compelled by a love for his brand of god, stopped by Emab, too. Deposited a package. Pillars crumbled, limbs separated from torsos, and the skies plumed with curling black smoke. They never found Chisom's body. I was cuddling Micah the night Mama called. Before she was done speaking, he was holding me back from flinging my body at my bedroom walls. It was strange, what stuck out in the hellish stillness afterward. One nostril clogged with snot but not the other. A fluttering housefly moonlit on the other side of my netted window. And Micah's grazing stubble meant to comfort, like sandpaper on my scalp.
"Life is too short," he said on the drive to Pearson. "When you come back, I am moving in."
In Nigeria, Mama and Papa and my four siblings and I lowered a bodiless coffin down, down, down. The day disrespectful, thick with sun. The night endless and full of drink and reminiscing, then Mama's conclusion: this country, this homeland, this giver of life and stealer of destinies, it was no longer hers. She'd finally use her visa and accompany me back to Canada. Start to figure out, from the few friends she knew were there, how to settle the rest of the family.
Three nights before Mama flew back with me, I called Micah. It was dinner time in Ontario, well past midnight here. Even in the bathroom's oppressive dark, my voice below a whisper, the walls seemed to listen, intent on discerning the cruel shape of my request. Micah asked for no clarification. Just an "Okay, I'll do it," followed by my phone's mechanical beeping.
Mama's first day past the plane was all fussing. So much snow. The sun "hanging uselessly" in the sky, as if for decoration. The cab driver who took circuitous routes, surely to inflate his fare. And then my apartment, with its bare spices, its unmarked walls, not a photo of a single friend–special or otherwise–anywhere. A man my age needed fresh flowers in his office den, she said, and a fridge that was always full. The air still smelled of Micah's cologne, and I wondered if she could glean a hint of our story from its earthy musk.
When, finally, Mama lapsed into sleep, I called Micah and suggested dinner.
"Don't bother," he replied. I wasn't sure if he meant just for the night or ever again, but my texts soon went unanswered. My calls, too. The night Mama had her friends over, even the last faint smell of him had been replaced by the spicy tang of her cooking. Continents apart, and somehow, these women found each other. Laughed in my living room over white-people quirks and foolish husbands back home and all the dramatic deliriums that followed "I do". I remembered we had talked, Micah and I, about it right there on that same couch, the sacredness of marriage and the wanting of eternity. Reconciling the want with Mama and Papa had often seemed like an unnecessary equation, two separate worlds forever perched on distant islands. Colliding now. My future caught in between.
After Mama's friends left, she and I stood together, scrub-scrub-scrubbing at the dishes in the sink. The dishwasher worked just fine, but sometimes, what is familiar makes the most sense. Mama said community is truly everywhere and I said, "Yes, it is." I'd found one here with a wonderfully kind man named Micah.
She lowered the pot, stared at me.
"A friend named Micah?" she asked.
"More than a friend," I replied.
I started from the beginning: when I was seven and felt a nameless thing for the classmate who often shot rubber bands at the backside of various teachers. I helped him with math assignments just so our hands could brush, my skin against his flame-hardened skin, a fire from long ago. It was Sunday night, near midnight, and we were on the couch now, Mama and me, the soapy pot still on her lap, dripping, a dazed look in her eyes. I talked until the words ran out. Then, a silence. Stretching long enough, painfully enough, to suggest a dozen multiverses. The pot finding my head. A return flight booked immediately. The call of a priest. A heart attack. Whose, I wasn't sure.
Mama rose and walked into the bathroom. She stayed there for an hour. When she emerged, she couldn't quite find my gaze.
"What about women?" she asked. "Did you ever try?"
It seemed an easy enough lie to grant. "Yes. But my body…it never worked with them."
A strange sort of clarity settled on her face, its force unravelling me even before she spoke. "This is why," she said. "You tried a thing once, your nervous body refused you, and now, you think you know yourself. Please, we have to–we have to try again."
How do you mitigate the wounds you inflict? Mama's request defied reason. It also offered her pain a moment's relief, so I nodded yes and called a cab. A long, silent ride, aside from the staticky radio's blare: Madonna, Janet Jackson, and somehow, Cyndi Lauper. Mama took my shivering hand. I wanted to pull away. At St. Michael's E.R., while Mama waited outside, the triage nurse asked me why I was here. His eyes bulged when I told him. He smiled a sad smile. Said he'd let the doctor know.
Hours passed beneath the haze of antiseptic, sweat, and latex. Names were called, feet prompted past a distant door. My neighbours on the bench's left side shifted: a sandy-haired elder coughing into his palm; a pale, quiet boy; a balding woman who shivered without control and picked at scabs on her elbow. On the right, Mama pulled out a book from her purse, a paperback purchased after our landing at Pearson, her eyes fixed on a page that never turned. At the fifth hour of waiting, I wanted to snatch it from her hands and fling it at her. To wound her like she'd wounded me, like I'd wounded Micah, all these people we carried in our hearts only to wound and poison them, slowly, lovingly. Wasn't this the right place then? The place you came to when lacerations opened the body in too many places, when the tears of the child you laboured over for years drove your own, when the bomb boomed, or a thing that could never be taken back turned the spirit frail. So many ways to die, even while breathing–and so many hurts that even the most skilled hands could not heal.
It was near sunrise when the doctor finally told us as much. By then, I'd memorized an entire landscape of coughs and sneezes and dead-eyed stares, my whole body hovering between anger and a desire for endless weeping. Staring squarely at my mom, kindness in his eyes, the doctor said he could run all kinds of tests on me–sperm count, testosterone and estrogen checks, EKGs–but they would all come back normal because I was normal. No, this sensitive topic called for family counselling, and he had some numbers if we were–
Mama scoffed and rose. I quickly followed. As we neared the hospital's exit, dawn's first light spilling through in slivers, she said that the doctor was probably gay himself. This was how the West operated, treating sickness as normalcy. She said the burden of my revelation weighed heavy on her soul, and without relief from the hospital, she needed to tell Papa. Only if I allowed it. An hour later, his call interrupted my fruitless toss and turns on a cold, sinking mattress. His first words were a question:
Does a lion birth a snake?
He said he womanized back in the day, king of the jungle before Mama tamed his wilderness, and it, therefore, did not befit his son's DNA to lure itself toward the same sex.
He said this is no debate.
He said say it is and you will kill your mother.
He said do you want that?
He hung up before I could answer.
"No," I whispered anyway. Sitting on the bed's edge. Where another had sat so many nights, his bare leg tucked over mine, our oceans of hair enmeshed. My phone was still aglow from the call with Dad. I dialled Micah's number for the first time in weeks, and even though he was a night owl, likely still asleep at this time, even though my previous calls had gone unanswered, he picked up on the first ring.
"I told Mama," I said. "Everything."
"I'm sending you a cab," he replied. "Right now."
While I laced my sneakers, I heard Mama's breathing from the guest room. A sleep that had not yet made its way to the snoring depths of oblivion. Would it ever? I was gentle with my touch as I shut the apartment door.
The cab driver was the same from earlier–small strange world–and he stayed mercifully silent again the entire ride. His radio, too. Micah sat waiting out front on the porch of his father's townhouse. I was barely out of the cab before he rushed me, the force of his hug ripping me to the ground. He pressed into me, chest to chest, and I grasped at his elbows so hard it surely hurt. We couldn't rise. Sidewalk dirt sullied our clothes, gravel pockmarking tiny cuts on our conjoined skins. The past several hours coalesced and escaped through my mouth and my nose and my heat-seared, blinking eyes, the words scarcely words. Micah held on, whispering it is okay, it is okay. His stubble, harsh still and so familiar, scratched concentric circles atop my scalp.
Read the other finalists
- Ghostworlds by Trent Lewin (Waterloo, Ont.)
- You (Streetcar at Night) by Dorian McNamara (Halifax)
- Lessons from a peach by Emi Sasagawa (Vancouver)
- My Father's Soil by Zeina Sleiman (Edmonton)
About the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize
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.
