As she prayed in her soft Cree, Clara leaned over and took Kendra’s hand. The women entered the cabin to find Mariah preparing her smudge bowl.Ĭlara and Kendra sat with Mariah as she lit her smudge, a special combination of many different medicines. Kendra was as close as she came to having a child, the daughter of her closest and oldest friend. “Lot of memories out there.” Clara reached out and hugged the young woman. Kendra stood in the doorway, looking this way and that, smiling, when her eyes fell on Clara.
It was just after noon when she got back to the cabin. She walked, oblivious to time, only turning back when the sun was high and the birch leaves shimmered all around her. She made her way toward the beginning of the trail she and Mariah had often walked to set snares, a faint tinkling rising on the breeze from the grove around the lodge. She thought she saw her dog, now long dead, a ghostly image running ahead of her as he had done then. She looked east and saw the beginnings of the many trails she and Mariah had walked so many years ago. She turned and headed toward the cabin door, a silvery glimmer distracting her. She looked down the hill and watched Mariah’s helpers readying the sweat lodge. Enjoy this short excerpt from Good’s Five Little Indians as inspiration for your own work, and submit today to receive a one-year subscription to Room, and for the chance to win a free copy of Five Little Indians!Ĭlara stood behind Mariah’s cabin, the late summer warmth rising from the soil. Our Short Forms Contest closes November 15th, 2021.
Her first novel, Five Little Indians won the HarperCollins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize and her poetry has been included in Best Canadian Poetry in Canada 2016 and Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in Canada 2017. Her poetry, and short stories have appeared in a number of publications.
She graduated from UBC with a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing MFA in 2014 where her novel Five Little Indians first started taking shape. Our 2021 Short Forms Contest is being judged by Michelle Good! Michelle Good is of Cree ancestry, a descendent of the Battle River Cree and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation.
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