The Edge of Change by Kelly S. Thompson
2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize shortlist
Kelly S. Thompson has made the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize shortlist for The Edge of Change.
She will receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and her work has been published on CBC Books.
The winner of the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize will be announced Sept. 21. They will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and win a two-week writing residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point.
If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize is open for submissions.
Kelly S. Thompson has an MFA and PhD in creative writing and is a mentor at the University of King's College MFA Nonfiction program. Her writing has won awards, including being longlisted for the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize for her story Dear CAF. Her essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in Chatelaine, the Toronto Star and Macleans. Her memoir, Girls Need Not Apply, was named a top 100 Book of 2019 by the Globe and Mail. Her second memoir, Still, I Cannot Save You, was released in spring 2023.
Thompson told CBC Books about the inspiration for The Edge of Change: "My sister had a series of abusive partners in her life, starting when she was a teenager. This essay is about when I went to visit her for the first time, a teenager myself but on the cusp of adulthood, and realizing her quest for love would lead my big sister to dark places. I wanted to protect her, but despaired knowing I couldn't."
You can read The Edge of Change below.
Warning: This story contains strong language.
The house was perched on a hill, overlooking the tired hamlet of Cookstown, appearing even smaller than it already was, full of antique shops and large animal feed co-ops to serve the surrounding farmland. It was March, an ugly time in southern Ontario when the ice sticks to the side of the road in a salty crust and fields left barren over the winter show rows of harvested cornhusks peeking out from melting snow. The house rose out of the muck like an apparition, a perfect replica of a Disney haunted house.
I pulled into the gravel driveway, feeling sick to my stomach, then parked my red Toyota underneath a maple, taking a moment to smooth my hand across the faded paint and kick the lawn mower-sized tires. I could have left, right then, spared us the anguish. But no. I knocked on the front door and pulled my winter coat tighter around my neck, although I had been trying to leave it loose, just a little bit, because that's what teens did back in the early 2000s. The trick was to never let anyone know you were freezing.
The door flung open and Tom greeted me with a wash of familiarity, leaning against the doorjamb with forced casualness. Tom was good looking, except for the unibrow that clung to his forehead like a wriggling annelid, and he had a crush on me, even though he was three years older, Meghan's age. One time, he took me out to play an overpriced game of golf at the Nottawasaga Inn, where he hovered over me at the ninth hole, his arm looped around the pin. I made par but didn't let him kiss me.
"Hey," Tom said, the centipede bouncing.
"Do you, uh, live here?"
"Naw, just hanging out with the guys." The sharp smell of his cologne stung my nostrils.
"My sister around?"
"Meg? Yeah, she's in the back." Tom nodded in the direction of the living room. I paused to take off my shoes but upon examining the carpet and Tom's brownish-white sport socks, decided against it. Then again, I'm not sure what I expected, with five twenty-year-old guys and my sister all living in the same house.
Meghan bounced in from the living room and threw her arms around me. "It's good to see you," she said, as though it had been years and not a few months.
"You too."
Her curvy body disappeared under a man's sweatshirt, smelling of Herbal Essences shampoo and cheap body spray from Shoppers Drugmart. It was hard to survey her in the dim light, but her eyes were rimmed with red and her face was swollen and blotchy. Thompson women are hideous criers. The evidence lingers for hours.
When I was a kid, wide awake and caught up in gripping anxiety disorders, Meghan was the only person who could soothe me. After listening to my unsettled sobs from down the hall, she would creep into my room, her flannel nightgown swishing around her feet, then crawl into bed with me, grip my tiny hand in hers and make up stories of magic carpets and sand dunes, princesses and other Disney tropes. It's okay. I'm here. She would stroke my hair until I fell asleep, surrounded by the smell of that same Herbal Essences shampoo.
In the living room with the crowd of men, the dank smell stifled me; a mixture of spilled beer, stale cigarette smoke, and a whiff of weed. I hovered awkwardly in the entryway while Meghan flopped on the couch next to her boyfriend. He had a wide face and a brutish body, although everyone looked imposing next to my petite sister, and he had hair the colour of espresso.
"Kelly, you remember Jim, eh?"
"Hi," I said, waving limply.
"What the fuck man! You've got to watch my back."
Jim didn't acknowledge me as he engaged in a full-blown attack in some war-simulating video game. In fact, he couldn't have looked less interested as he punched buttons on his controller.
"And this is everyone else," Meghan said, sweeping her arm around the room. Four guys grunted before returning to the game that blazed on an imposing television screen.
"Beat THAT." Jim's annihilation of his friends was celebrated with a loud whoop and he threw the controller to the next contender. He draped a hairy arm across the back of the sofa, his meaty paw resting on my sister's shoulder. Well, not resting, per se but gripping tightly.
"You want to see the place?" Meghan asked me, her voice high and tight. I bobbed my head, excited for an excuse to leave the room of imagined war.
"The kitchen, obviously," she said as we passed through a tight entryway and into a kitchen straight out of the 1970s. The cupboards were flaking brown stain onto the countertop and the linoleum peeled up at the corners. In another life, perhaps the room saw cozy roast dinners and steel cut oats laid out on linen tablecloths. Now, all that remained was congealed Kraft Dinner crusted onto the stove, which I suspected had been lingering a day or two.
"And upstairs," Meghan said with a flourish of her palm, "We all have our own bedroom. Jim and I get the master."
"The other guys don't mind him having the biggest room?"
Meghan shrugged, noncommittal. She opened the bedroom door revealing exactly what I expected; piles of clothes, half eaten food on moldy plates, sheets a haphazard mess and curtains drawn so tight it looked like a tomb. What I didn't see was a candle, a girly figurine, or a stitch of her clothing. Nothing that said Meghan lived there too.
"Where's all your stuff?"
"It's laundry day," she said, as though this was all the explanation I needed. Her eyes darted nervously. "Gotta pee."
She ducked into the bathroom just as Tom came upstairs and gestured towards the door.
"Meghan's in there," I said.
"Five people in the house and one bathroom. Stupid," Tom said, sucking his teeth. "Kinda sad around here, eh?" He raised what I imagined to be the tail end of his eyebrow-come-caterpillar.
"Sad?"
"You know," Tom motioned around him with his pointer finger, "The house."
I shrugged. "Somewhere to live, I guess."
"Did Meghan get a drawer yet?" Tom peeked inside the darkness, sniffed and made a sour face. "You know, a drawer. To put her stuff in."
"She's been here for two months," I said, peering into the dark room, eying a stack of clothes that looked like the body in them had vanished. "Of course she has drawers." I resisted the urge to step inside and make room for my sister in the filthy shithole. Instead, I hovered on the edge of change, of saviour, of compassion. Feet planted firmly and committed to ambivalence.
"Naw, Jim makes her keep all her stuff in clothes hampers. When they fight, he can throw it all out into the hallway. Your sister, I tell ya. She's too nice for her own good. Tries to cover it up from us, the way he treats her. Out of shame, I think."
Tom's voice was filled with what, acquiescence? Did I know what that was back then? I resisted asking questions when I knew the answer would make my stomach ache, so we stood in awkward silence until Meghan emerged from the bathroom, wiping her hands on her pants. Apparently, no hand towel to be found in hell. I hoped my bladder would hold for the duration of my visit.
"Hey, Tom," she said jokingly, "quit creeping on my sister." She elbowed him in the ribs as she passed.
"I was just waiting for the bathroom," he said, face turning crimson, locking the door with a click.
"He's crazy about you," Meghan said to me, grinning. "Hungry?" We returned to the kitchen, where she made a sandwich with a meager amount of ham slapped between two slices of Wonderbread.
"Want one?" She looked nervous to ask, as though she hoped I wouldn't accept. I shook my head and sat gingerly on one of the vinyl kitchen chairs. "So, you're almost a high school grad," Meghan said, her mouth full of food. "And I heard you got into the university you wanted."
"Yeah. I'm excited."
"You living in res?"
"Commuting."
A pause hung in the air like a thick cloud.
Jim strutted in, scratching his belly and stretching his arms wide like a character from Trailer Park Boys, looking to me then Meghan and her meal. "We can't afford to feed everyone you know."
"I didn't eat," I said, voice tense. He ignored me.
"You didn't make me one?" he addressed Meghan, voice booming, gesturing at her last bite of sandwich that just entered her mouth. I thought she was going to spit it into his hand like an offering, acknowledging the pecking order. Instead, Meghan hurried to work. Mayo, Dijon, lettuce, and an inch-thick stack of ham.
For a moment, Meghan appeared before me as a Betty Crocker replica. I imagined a ruffled apron, and her hair bound in a hairspray-stiff bouffant. I pictured her in a pair of black pumps and lips traced with that perfect red that you can never seem to find for yourself, prim and proper woman, the way the 1950s wanted us. For a second, Meghan was something else, not a college dropout making a sandwich for her abusive boyfriend.
Meghan cut the bread in a diagonal line and arranged the sandwich on a white plate, angling the slices just so, promptly carrying it into the living room where Jim had retreated to his game. He pushed her out of the way when she blocked the television. He didn't say thank you. I wasn't surprised.
Meghan flopped at the kitchen table, her face resigned. "I have to go," I said. "Forgot I have some homework."
"Really? I thought you were staying for a while." Meghan followed me to the door and we stood awkwardly in the foyer.
She held me out by my arms to assess my face, so different from her own. "I'm happy, you know." Her voice cracked, revealing too much.
We had reached an age where people assumed that I was the older sister, towering over her, muscled and athletic compared to her tiny frame that begged to be insulated from reality. It was also an age of acceptance. Acceptance of those unchangeable, tangible elements of life.
"I'm glad. I'll come back soon, okay?"
We both knew I was lying. I peeled her freckled arms from my waist and quickly got into my car, the engine spitting as I turned the ignition and pulled an expert three-point turn before crunching away on the gravel. Madonna's "Like a Prayer" bleated into my static speakers as Meghan waved from the front step, her face red and blotchy. From my rearview mirror, she morphed into a tiny female effigy before disappearing into the house on the hill.
Read the other finalists
- That Poor Girl by Finnian Burnett (Princeton, B.C.)
- Glossary for an Aswang by Louie Leyson (Surrey, B.C.)
- Environmental Services by Christine Lowther (Tofino, B.C.)
- Black Diamond by Barbara Joan Scott (Calgary)
About the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize
The winner of the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and win a two-week writing residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.
The 2024 CBC Short Story Prize is currently open until Nov. 1, 2023 at 4:59 p.m. ET. The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2024 and the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April 2024.
