Read an excerpt from Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Glorious Frazzled Beings by Angélique Lalonde
The $100,000 prize is the biggest in Canadian literature
Glorious Frazzled Beings by Angélique Lalonde is on the shortlist for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
The $100,000 prize is the biggest in Canadian literature. The winner will be announced on Nov. 8, 2021.
In the short story collection Glorious Frazzled Beings, human and more-than-human worlds come together in places we call home. Among other tales, a ghost tends to the family garden, a shape-shifting mother deals with the complexities of love when one son is born with beautiful fox ears and another is not and a daughter tries to make sense of her dating profile after her mom dies.
Lalonde is a B.C. writer whose work has been featured in Prism International, the Journey Prize Anthology, Room and the Malahat Review. She received the 2019 Writers' Trust Journey Prize and was nominated for a National Magazine Award.
Read an excerpt from Glorious Frazzled Beings below.
Lady with the Big Head Chronicle
The lady with the big head is out there in the misty morning. Is she wearing a veil? What is she doing in my garden? The mist is sitting on the river, slightly spread over the land. I see the mountain beyond, and the lady with the big head stooped over my onions. Not like yesterday when the mist was so thick I wouldn't have seen her if she had been there.
Was she out there yesterday, picking calendula seeds to save for next season? She didn't ask me if she could tend my garden while I was in the house doing other things. She's never talked to me at all. She avoids me if I try to approach her, floating off into the mist or the memory of mist, then reappearing later doing different things in different places. I saw her digging at an anthill with the bear that has been hanging around our yard. She used a stick and the bear used her big broad paws.
I could offer her a hot tea but if I walk out there she'll float away from me.
The lady with the big head was helping the bear, or the bear was helping the lady with the big head, I'm not sure which. Either way, they were digging up the anthill near the apple tree. I didn't mind that. I had noticed the ants were in the sickly tree crawling all around and that probably was not a good sign, so maybe the lady with the big head and the bear were helping the apple tree too.
She might be taking some onions, or weeding, or eating slugs. I can't tell exactly what she is doing because the veil that hangs down from her big head drapes over her body to the ground and hides her movements. Also the light has not yet come, only a faint blueness and all that mist. I could offer her a hot tea but if I walk out there she'll float away from me.
Later I'll go look and see if she has taken onions or left any knick-knacks. Once I found a spool of golden thread so strong, fine, and shiny, I knew it was magical. The kind of thread that could be used to build spiderwebs that are always visible no matter the light. Visible but still translucent, an ephemeral quality of there and not quite there, only gold instead of silver. It might be what she makes her veil out of, or at least what she uses to mend the veil, because now that I think of it the veil is not golden, it's more of a purple-grey shadow. Sometimes she has it pulled back and I can almost make out her features as she goes about doing things ladies with big heads do. She looks a little bit like me and a little bit like Rod Stewart, which is an odd mix for a lady. A couple of times I've glimpsed her looking like my dog, John Black, who died last winter. She might have taken her skull from the forest, where we left the dog's body, to use as a mask; it seems like something the lady with the big head would do.
Lady with the big head and the weight of her head
The lady with the big head is having trouble holding her head up. It's dipping forward this week, jutting at the chin. A chiropractor would look at her and shudder, thinking of her unhappy spine, contorted and compressed by the heaviness of gravity. He would want to brace her somehow, crack her in all sorts of places, and have her do little exercises with devices of his own making to relieve the pressure on her neck.
She seeps in my window and makes me dream them too.
Who can she consult for this, living as she does in the forest? Being only partway real? Who would book her in for an appointment with her lack of proper name and no address to speak of? No email or phone number to confirm a correct time? Who would make a call to the forest, following her trail to find where she is sleeping and wrench that crook from her neck? How would she pay them? Would a chiropractor accept dried mushrooms in payment for his services? Would he treat without an X-ray showing the insides of the lady with the big head's troubled bones?
Instead we build her a device from which she can hang upside down, with a long flat back that inverts once she's strapped herself in. I hang there a lot when she's not using it, feeling the blood pool in my head, imagining my spine unkinking so more of my life can bubble up through that crazy central nerve cluster that sends messages all through my body, making it so I can know.
Lady with the big head has a dream
She had a quiet dream, the lady with the big head. It was quiet so she kept sleeping. If it had been a loud raucous dream she would have startled herself out of it. She does not want to dream raucous dreams. Still, sometimes she does. She seeps in my window and makes me dream them too.
Excerpted from Glorious Frazzled Beings. Copyright © 2021 by Angélique Lalonde. Excerpted by
permission of House of Anansi Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
