‘Grocery Girl’
— Joyce Chong
Years ago, her mother washed herself clean of Lux, and Lux, unclean and glassblown, wakes up every morning with the scent of dishwater in her mouth, like a dream she can never hold onto for very long. Lux goes to school with this caught-dream mouth, words spilling into a yellow paste.
With beautiful prose, shifting from surreal imagery to uncertain identity and visions and images and memories that may or may not have happened, this finalist piece for Winter Tangerine’s prose award earns its title. The ambiguous, the not well-defined, has never been so crisp, so strange and vivid. The use of second person is an unexpected turn in this story, shifting focus from Lux as main character to you, the reader, and your sudden uncertain identity. The wide open spaces where “you” exists, the spots where the illustration is left unfinished.
Water, too, is a form of connection: teeth and hands, tongue and fist, like pressing your mouth against the dampest part of the sidewalk and expecting it to flow back to you.
There is the underlying theme of inevitabilities, or curses, or destiny. Of obsession and mystery and disappearances, the way people leave so many stories left unfinished, simply by leaving. The imagery cycles, overlaps and repeats and morphs with the prose. Every cycle reveals a new secret, something only mentioned sideways, through a break in the clouds; a sliver of truth. There is a purpose to this repetition, the rich disconnect of imagery streaming assuredly from one to another. The sensation is almost like rushing through a dream, too strange not to be real.