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    What The Voices Say: Short Story
    What The Voices Say: Short Story
    What The Voices Say: Short Story
    Ebook40 pages37 minutes

    What The Voices Say: Short Story

    By Sharon Butala

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    About this ebook

    As a child, Charlotte spent her summers with her cousins in a house that was the polar opposite of her own. Where her household was organized and ran according to schedule, her cousins lived in a state of constant chaos. For Charlotte, this was both exciting and frightening, especially when her aunt’s cousin Dorcas—who is said to hear spirits—came to visit, her presence enhancing the already strange atmosphere of the house.

    Fever is a collection of sixteen short stories that reveal the secret inner lives of women and men, skilfully peeling back their defenses to expose crystallizing moments of joy, pain, fear, and guiltless pleasure. Sharon Butala infuses Fever with an intensity of emotion that often catches readers off guard, making for a reading experience that is always honest and powerful.

    HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 30, 2013
    ISBN9781443421652
    What The Voices Say: Short Story
    Author

    Sharon Butala

    SHARON BUTALA is an award-winning and bestselling author of both fiction and non-fiction. Her classic book The Perfection of the Morning was a #1 bestseller and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Fever, a short story collection, won the 1992 Authors’ Award for Paperback Fiction and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book (Canada and Caribbean region). Butala is a recipient of the Marian Engel Award, the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, and the 2012 Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence. In 2002 she became an Officer of the Order of Canada. She lives in Calgary, Alberta.

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      Book preview

      What The Voices Say - Sharon Butala

      Book Cover

      What the Voices Say

      Sharon Butala

      Contents

      Cover

      Title Page

      What the Voices Say

      About the Author

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      What the Voices Say

      When I was young, the only family I knew aside from my parents, I was an only child too, were three cousins, two girls and a boy, my father’s half-brother’s children. I say ‘knew’ because they are all three dead now. Antonio committed suicide at seventeen, and I think now there must have been a curse on that family, though it didn’t seem so to me at the time. Then I thought their lives thrilling beyond words, and even though I was often frightened by the things they did, or had apparently done, or that happened to them, I could never understand why it was that none of them happened to me or to my family, but only to theirs. It made me feel I wasn’t quite real, a shadow, destined always to live only on the fringes of the lives of others. And since Morgan, the oldest, was a world-traveller from her first backpacking trip around Europe at eighteen till she disappeared in the Orient years later, and Rhonda, the youngest, changed her name to Pamela Sue, ran away to become a starlet in Hollywood, I even saw her in a picture once, and died from a drug overdose at twenty-four, while I have done what I said I would do, become a writer, and an unwilling recluse, it turns out that my childhood perception, which I spent years trying to shake, was true.

      Still, when I was young I was glad to claim them as relatives. My tales of their exploits gave me an importance among my friends at school that I could never have earned myself. I shared my stories in the girls’ washroom at recess and on our walks to and from school, and it was gratifying when every once in a while, a girl I hardly knew would sidle up to me and ask, bright-eyed, what the latest news of my cousins was, and then listen intently while I told her.

      Rhonda was closest to me in age, only a year older, Antonio was five years older and Morgan six, but ages didn’t really matter since their’s wasn’t an ordinary family where the kids played together and went places together. When I visited them it wasn’t to do things with my cousins. Mostly I just skulked about the house and watched and listened and went on my own private and blissfully unsupervised forays here and there on the acreage where they lived a few miles from a city. Every summer for at least a month I visited them and it was when I was there that I experienced the only freedom I knew as a child, for their house was an escape from the cold rigidity and painful, pathological cleanliness of my home, that seemed to me constructed to hide only emptiness, a terrible, emotionless void.

      At my cousins’ I slept in

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