Mannequin Envy

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Jai Britton was born in Saskatchewan where she learned to spell long words at an early age. She has studied the art of lying under the tutelage of Canada’s top playwright, Ken Mitchell, and also Joanne Gerber, best new short fiction book award winner.

Jai lives in the beautiful foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Recently, she was a semi-finalist for the televised version of the 3-Day Novel Contest and a winner of the National Novel Writing Month contest for her first full length work The Atomic Weight of Homelessness. She is currently stalling on another novel project ironically called interruption while filling her time writing bad poetry and long letters.

She is a student of early American literature and a lover of Greek mythology. She enjoys short fiction that stings like the business end of a broken beer bottle.

Some recent online work includes:

Sample’s of Jai’s Fiction:

Selections from a book in progress, “100 Stones”

Fear of Flying

You only know you cannot fly because you’ve been told as such. Throw this upon the laundry pile with other fatherless lies: you’ll never grow up, you’ll never amount to much, and you think you are special.

I got on the train at 52nd Street and pressed my head against the glass while others pressed against me. We’re all trying to get out; the process in which we are trying to get off. I felt a sticky spot on my leg.

I’m never getting out, off, or up. Attempts to fly are numerous. When you stop trying, you can leave.
*

Milton’s Last House

There was no paradise lost, only misplaced in the cupboard behind the coffee mug won on a phone-in contest. The shelf was needing a scratch on its belly. Knobs on the doors gave tarnished a new definition. Perhaps it was applewood once, maybe cypress, but now was black from neglect. She wondered how pomegranates grow, whether on a bush or in a tree, and perhaps this wood could be restored. Her eyes unfocused, but only for a minute, her mind jogging back to what needed to be done today.

She took the mug, rinsed it thoroughly, and drank some water.
*

The Inklings and Misogyny

I write into the hole, throwing paper after the liver, the onion, the Shitake mushrooms on marbled rye, wanting to become wise without the burden of discontent. No…without the luggage of suspicion, I mean. Or could it be the load-bearing age of skepticism?

Like Fox Mulder, I desperately want to believe. Problem: I do it too frequently, ergo
seeing aliens of want emerging from my closet every evening. Anal probing can happen at any time, without warning.

I hunger but there are clubs where girls aren’t allowed. Face-down, I enter backward
and hope for the best. I hope.
*

Excerpt from interruption:

My father used to love stories about the unreal, especially Ripley’s Believe It or Not! or old reruns of the Twilight Zone. He would get so immersed my mother would have to remind him to eat his sandwich and put down that picture of the two-headed cow because it wasn’t improving her appetite at all.

My brother, Bill, had found a dying sparrow on the road one winter, wrapped it in his scarf, and brought it home. He kept it hidden outside knowing my mother wouldn’t approve (would freak right out to Mars, is how he put it) and hoped it would survive until my father arrived home from work that evening.

When my father came down the street, Bill flew out to meet him nearly knocking him down in his anticipation to show him the sparrow. Together they went to where Bill had stashed it. Heads together they bent over to look at the dying creature. From the window I saw my father’s boot rise and fall, swiftly crushing the bird. Bill’s mouth hung open and he turned to my father with giant tears in his eyes. My father picked up the dead bird body without a word to Bill and strode to the fence, dumping it over and out of our yard.

Bill stormed into the house and slammed his bedroom door. He didn’t come out for supper. He didn’t come out to watch Cliffhanger! (which was his favourite television show), he didn’t come out to brush his teeth.

I awoke at about midnight to hear my father whispering in Bill’s room. My father was saying in a gentle voice, “There is nothing unusual about death, Bill. You can’t pretend there is.” A pause. A heavy sigh. “Are you listening? Death is the dumbest person I know. He’s not clever at all. He doesn’t have to be.”