Hollay Ghadery's Widow Fantasies

Short Fiction | Issue 38

Jun 30, 2024

Post-Partum Ocean View

He said he’d be back in a minute but he’s been gone for hours. Now baby’s blue eyes are pooling black and when she opens her mouth to laugh, I see her bottom two teeth have multiplied, lining the back of her throat like pebbled coral. She sits in her diaper on her playmat, blocks and board books scattered. She watches when I push myself into the back of the couch, watches me huddle, knees pulled to chest. She’s the sponge in my brain, swelling. A clock on the wall flickers and sticky handprints scuttle across the window, a sheet of muted light—an oceanview, if you’re sinking to the bottom of an ocean. Her belly button ripples open, inhales, then closes. She could crawl to me if she wanted to. She could pull herself up on the couch and wiggle over, but she rocks back and forth, dark eyes on my face, drooling.

Jesus, Sara

The Slip ‘n Slide stretches out before her, yawning down a modest incline to the playground. Sara yanks up her baggy gym shorts. Trixie, who is still milling around her feet, has tugged them down around her hips, wanting to be picked up.

“Uppy,” she whines.

Sara feels her lip curl and forces it back down. She stands at the top of the hill, at the head of the slide. The other day camp counsellors are having a water balloon fight with the older kids. Because her mom was out late again last night and couldn’t find her car keys this morning—Sara got dropped off late. And so, last to arrive has to take care of the babies.

Staff rule.

And not babies, really. Preschoolers. Perpetually runny- nosed and barely toilet-trained.

Sara looks down at Trixie, whose heat-flushed face is lifted, expectant, mouth open like a scrawny pink baby bird.

She was around Trixie’s age the first time she remembers her mom coming home days late from wherever she’d disappeared to. And she’d run to her in the kitchen, wrapping her arms around her mother’s legs, burying her face in the crotch of her jeans. And Sara registered a heavy, sweet odour under the more familiar smell of cigarettes before her mom peeled her off her body, pushed her back and away.

Jesus, Sara. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the side of her mouth. You’re so fucking needy. She said this, and one side of her lip lifted, as if being raised by an invisible hook.

Sara’s grandmother handed Sara a plate of Oreos and guided her back to the worn spot on the burgundy rug in front of the TV. Blue’s Clues. In the kitchen, the hiss of a can opening.

Trixie places her pudgy hand on Sara’s thigh. Sara sucks in her breath, resists the urge to swat it off.

“Uppy,” Trixie continues to whine, now clawing at Sara’s bare skin.

Sara grinds her teeth and feigns concentrating on the other little kids sucking on juice boxes and slithering down the long yellow rectangle of wet plastic. Trixie tugs her shorts again.

“Uppy!”

Sara drops down so fast Trixie startles. When she pushes Trixie back and watches her slide away, every cell in her body chitters. As the child grabs at the space between them, as the child opens her mouth to scream.

Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, is scheduled for release with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a co-host of Angela’s Bookclub on 105.5 FM, as well as HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist and the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Widow Fantasies
by Hollay Ghadery
Gordon Hill Press, 2024

Publisher’s Description

Fantasies are places we briefly visit; we can’t live there. The stories in Widow Fantasies deftly explore the subjugation of women through the often subversive act of fantasizing. From a variety of perspectives, through a symphony of voices, Widow Fantasies immerses the reader in the domestic rural gothic, offering up unforgettable stories from the shadowed lives of girls and women.

Praise for Widow Fantasies

“If Rumi and Alice Munro sat down to a meal, it just might be served by Hollay Ghadery. Her piquant glimpses into the vibrant interior lives of characters (from wives to grandfathers to girls and husbands) yield a jewel-tone richness. Ontario barns, Iranian food, steamy bathrooms, children, sex, loneliness and too-much togetherness, all syncopate into Ghadery’s absorbing worlds. The sassy-voiced stories in Widow Fantasies seem to melt in your mouth like fruit gelees—yet the taste of their observation lasts. I savoured them all.” — Molly Peacock, author of The Widow’s Crayon Box

"Widow Fantasies is an astounding collection of short stories from poet, Hollay Ghadery. With unflinching fierce and tender honesty, Ghadery captures private, intimate moments in the lives of her characters. The wit, range and cheeky defiance in these stories will leave you breathless. Her writing does that rare thing we want art to do for us: sparkle, astound and pack a punch. This is a collection to sit with and savour." — Salma Hussain, author of The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan

"At turns shocking, funny, and heartbreaking, the stories in Hollay Ghadery’s, Widow Fantasies serve up densely packed miniatures embracing the gothic dysfunctions of the nuclear family. Ghadery’s stories take an unflinching look at family life and explode the myths of a bucolic domestica. These sure-footed stories make for compelling reading." — Nancy Jo Cullen, author of The Western Alienation Merit Badge and winner of the 2010 Dayne Ogilvie Prize

Upcoming Events in 2024

July 26th, 7 p.m. - 9 p.m.: Reading with Jade Wallace at Take Cover Books in Peterborough.

September 8th: Eden Mills Writers Festival. Panel and time TBD.

September 10th, 6 p.m.: Toronto launch of Widow Fantasies with Nicola Winstanley and Danila Botha at Queen Books.

September 19th, 7 p.m.: Sessions in the Studio at Blue Heron Books, in conversation with Molly Peacock.

September 21st: Culture Days in Port Perry, Ontario. Time and event TBD.

October 5th: Ampersand Festival. Panel and time TBD.

November 2nd to 3rd: Wordstock Sudbury. Panel and time TBD.

See Hollay’s website for more details.

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