The Short of It: Curtis John McRae & Quietly, Loving Everyone

For Short Story Month, one author will join us every Friday to answer five questions about their work and share an excerpt from their short story collection.

All Lit Up: Tell us about your collection in a few short sentences.

Curtis John McRae: I’ve always felt that it’s no longer my place to say what my stories are about once I’ve published them. That’s for the reader, and I’d be stripping them of that interactive experience. But this collection has a few recurrent themes and preoccupations. I’m interested in accountability—how we show up for each other. I’m sort of obsessed with this idea that in crises, when we try to show up for people and help them, we might be inflicting more damage only because the ways we’ve learned to love are damaging. Quietly, Loving Everyone is a reference to the ways we don’t show up for each other, or the ways we fail to show up; It’s complicity from a distance. I’m curious about what love looks like across different relationships and different cultural moments; how individualism is something of a lie we tell ourselves in the West, how we’re situated in communities, or families, and how we rely on others, most of whom we don’t even know. It’s a book about characters who aren’t really accepted by their communities and what comes of that: the abused friend, the brother who goes off on his own, James Dean raised from the dead. They’re this way because they’re alienated. Everyone is implicated in these days.

ALU: How do you approach writing a short story—do you start with an image, a character, or something else?

CJM: I almost always start from an image (a deflated helium balloon floating in the corner of a room) or a scene between two characters (a couple arguing about their shower curtains), and then I build out and discover what I’m preoccupied with and what I’m trying to explore. It’s a form of improv in a way—I set a scene and add some characters and start adding details, and then it starts to take shape—or like drawing my own Rorschach and then saying what I think it looks like. I’ll occasionally gain inspiration from a line of poetry. There are quite a few references to poetry in this book. “Ulcers, Singing” is structured off two lines from a Robert Hass poem. I’ve always liked working with poetry as a place of departure. Poetry is so concentrated, I like to drop it into stories and see how it plays out. I imagine it as watching a drop of blood dripped into a glass of water. It expands to fill the container, and soon the whole glass of water has a rose tint.

ALU: What do you love about the short story form?

CJM: The intimacy and poetry of it. Short stories come in all shapes and sizes, but there’s always a sense of immediacy and urgency. The simile of a novel being like a marriage and a short story being like an affair has already been made, but you can spend 10 minutes reading a short story and suddenly 10 years have passed and you’re still thinking of it.

ALU: Who are some of your favourite short story writers?

CJM: Oh…how to choose? Chekov (The Essential Tales of Chekov), Ray Bradbury (The Illustrated Man), Roald Dahl (The Complete Short Stories), Mavis Gallant (Montreal Stories), Ian McEwan (First Love, Last Rites), James Baldwin (Going to Meet the Man), Tobias Wolff (Our Story Begins), Amy Hempel (Reasons to Live), Lori Moore (Self-Help), Grace Paley (The Collected Stories), Tim O’Brien (The Things We Carried),Mary Gaitskill (Bad Behaviour), Richard Yates (Eleven Kinds of Loneliness), Etgar Keret (Suddenly, A Knock on the Door), Denis Johnson (Jesus’ Son), Zadie Smith (Grand Union), Souvankham Thammavongsa (How to Pronounce Knife), Billy-Ray Belcourt (Coexistence), Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You), George Saunders (all of it), Neil Smith (Bang Crunch), Paige Cooper (Zolitude), Mikhail Iossel (Love Like Water, Love Like Fire), etc.

ALU: What are three things on your writing desk/place of writing?

CJM: A friendly crow, a postcard illustrated by Neil Smith, and my grandfather’s model wooden sailboat, the “Hermione.”

After dinner, Lenny and Izzy shared a cigarette on the balcony. It had been snowing all night and so they

stood with one foot on the balcony and one in the living room, half in and half out, leaning against the door frame and blowing smoke toward the clouds. They shared old stories, laughter, and the same pair of shoes. The world was distant, and the snow kept everything at bay. The trees moved slowly in the wind. Billie Holiday sang sad melodies to an empty living room. In the bedroom over, next to Izzy’s bookshelf, a two-day-old helium balloon drifted, slowly petering out.

They hadn’t bothered to clear the table, instead basking in the aftermath of the gluttonous meal. The lamb shanks had been gnawed to the bone, fat floated like air bubbles on a sea of oil, and their plates still lay on a wooden crate beside an empty bottle of wine. They knew it would have to be cleaned up, but not right then. Lenny’s and Izzy’s imprints, softly pressed into the carpet, were still visible on either side of the crate. They smoked the rest of their cigarette, coughing and laughing behind a glowing ember, and then lit a second from the remnants of the first.

The balloon was from Geoff’s send-off party before his conference in Turkey. Izzy had been dating Geoff for two years and had moved into his apartment. Lenny had never met Geoff, but had observed evidence of him in the apartment—framed pictures of the couple, a stick of Old Spice deodorant in the bathroom, a man’s belt hanging from the closet door.

“How’s New York?” Izzy asked.

“Full of pigeons,” Lenny said.

“Sounds like you were right to upend everything and rush down there. And the Master’s program?”

“It’s horrible, I’m kidding. I like the program too.”

Lenny had left Montreal three years ago. At first he and Izzy had talked about trying long distance, but they were both in their early twenties at the time. They had things they still wanted to experience. Neither believed the long distance would work, so they got ahead of it and decided to end things on friendly terms instead of letting it sour over time. They had only been dating for a year, and before that they had been friends for a couple of years. One of them was always dating someone else. Once Izzy and Lenny started dating, they admitted they had always had a feeling that they would end up together. Their significant others probably sensed this, and it may have even led to some of those relationships ending. Even when they broke up, they agreed that they would probably still end up together again, after they had each lived more of their respective lives.

“And the acting?” he asked.

“Not paying the bills.” She stole the smoke from Lenny’s hands. “Still working at Café Myriade and doing

some freelance design work on the side. Geoff doesn’t charge me rent, which helps.”

Lenny winced. “Any good roles?”

“I’ve been cast as Mimi in La Bohème. It’ll be debuting at the Centaur in the spring.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Was I supposed to?”

“I’m sorry. I meant ‘Congratulations.’” Lenny stole the cigarette back. “What’s it about?”

“A bohemian seamstress and her entourage of socialites living in 1830s Paris.”

“So not much acting involved?”

“You’re an asshole.”

During the winter and summer breaks, Lenny came back to Montreal to visit his mom, his friends, and Izzy. He didn’t want to admit the latter to her. The first year, they were both single so they saw no problem hooking up. When Izzy started dating Geoff, they said they’d go back to being just friends, but they still hadn’t managed.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said. “I know you can sing, but opera?”

“Didn’t you know?” Izzy held her arms out. “I’m a tour de force.”

They stood in silence for a while. Lenny thought about their first cigarette, the first time they slept together, the first time she had asked him to tie her up, and that one time he drove her to the hospital after she fell off a swing and broke her nose. They finished the cigarette and went back in, sliding the door behind them and carrying the dishes to the kitchen sink.

It was December 27, the no man’s land between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Lenny had texted Izzy. Want to see me? He had already spent too much time with his family. His friends were busy until New Year’s Eve, and he missed her. To his surprise, she invited him over for dinner. She had never invited him over to the apartment because of Geoff. It felt risky, like they were crossing a line. They both knew they’d have to stop seeing each other soon, but not now. One condition. Bring your mom’s homemade Nanaimo bars, she’d texted. I know she always keeps a stash in the back of the fridge.

Lenny rolled his sleeves up and poured some water into the sink. Izzy’s reflection doubled in the kitchen

window. With the chandelier on, it became a one-way mirror.

“I heard my neighbour crying last night,” Izzy said into the cabinet where she kept the gin.

“What do you think they were crying about?”

“You tell me.”

She pulled the ice tray from the freezer and bent the hard plastic over the counter until a few cubes popped out. Apart from the gin, she poured two other liquors he didn’t recognize into their glasses.

“He’s an older man who lives alone. No one visits him.” She handed him a glass as he wiped the suds off

on his shirt. “It’s a Negroni. Sip it slowly.”

She slouched down on the floor beside him, resting against the cabinets.

“Did you know your neighbours growing up?” she asked, sitting with her chest pressed against her knees.

“What did you say was in here? It’s bitter as hell.”

“I once helped him bring his groceries up. He invited me in for tea afterwards. I told him I had work. I

still regret not going in. He’s sweet and harmless.”

“Do you have any soda I could dilute this with?”

Lenny placed the drink next to the edge of the sink, hoping it might fall in. He had neglected to mention that he had been seeing his neighbour Holly back in Brooklyn. He picked the drink back up and glanced

around for something he could sweeten it with.

“Oh!” Izzy hopped back up and peeled a sliver of rind off an orange. She twirled the pith and pinched

it toward Lenny, shooting a mist of citrus at him, then dropped it into his drink. “There,” she said, and plopped back onto the floor. Once the dishes were done, they went over to the bedroom.

Lenny placed his drink on the nightstand and dove onto the bed. He pulled his phone from his pocket and

played “Helplessness Blues” by Fleet Foxes, but it was still connected to the Bluetooth speaker in the next room over. There were three unopened texts from Holly. A surge ran through his body, followed by a pang of guilt. The thought of Geoff texting Izzy right now made him more bitter than his drink.

He wasn’t technically cheating. He had met Holly in the program, and later found out they weren’t only living in the same building but were neighbours. When they started regularly hooking up, he asked about their status. I don’t believe in monogamy, Holly said. I need to be able to love everyone. Some nights of the week, through the thin walls, Lenny learned this was true.

But then again, he was cheating with Izzy. They were both cheating, together. He convinced himself that

she might still love him and somehow it made his life more interesting, which he knew was selfish, but he also knew he loved her. He felt like he was less to blame. Any way he spun it, he would regret whichever relationship was undone.

Izzy splayed herself across the carpet, running her hands through the white fibres and her own black haloes of hair.

“When I was young,” Lenny said, “my parents used to listen to our neighbours’ conversations through my

baby monitor.”

“They spied on them?” Izzy asked.

“It wasn’t the McCarthy era. Their voices came through and they’d just listen.” He reluctantly finished

his drink, wanting the effect more than the drink itself.

“Give it to me, I’ll pour another round. Something different this time.”

Lenny spoke up so Izzy could hear him from the kitchen. “They’d set up these baby monitors, you know, to check if I was breathing or something. And they’d be in the kitchen eating, and they’d hear these voices in the apartment.”

“Mhmm.”

“And they were just talking casually, like we are right now, you know? Just these voices. Two people talking, clear as day.”

Izzy came back with two glasses of wine. She handed one over and sat next to him on the bed, her

feet dangling off the edge. Lenny hopped off and paced the room.

“My mom and dad decided to open a bottle of wine and just sit there, listening. They made a game of it.

They’d invent different contexts each time, but it was always the same couple. Other times, they’d listen for a bit and then turn off the speaker and ad-lib the rest of the conversation.”

Lenny put his drink down and lay on the floor, his head resting on the carpet. He noticed the cracked

plaster on the ceiling and wondered what would leak through if it cracked any further.

“Mom used to tell me these stories after Dad left. It was our way of reminiscing. I was young, but after he

left, it’s like we had been woken from a dream.”

“Did they hear anything good?”

“The couple spent a few weeks planning a heist.”

“You’re kidding?” Izzy sat up. “Did they do it?”

“That’s not what’s important.”

Izzy fell back on top of the comforter.

“Some nights, the couple fought over whose turn it was to take out the trash. Others, they planned a heist. They read to their child before bed. They watched porn. They role-played. ‘Please, take anything you find, just don’t hurt me or my child … No, not the lamp! That belonged to my great aunt Mary! Seriously…Steve. Steve. Watch the lamp.’”

Izzy and Lenny both laughed, and like most good laughs, they felt the silence in the room when it was over.

“It’s strange to think of these things happening around us,” Izzy said. “I wonder what people would

think if they listened to us.”

Lenny stared at the ceiling and closed his eyes and tried to listen to the lives playing out around them. When he opened his eyes and looked over at her, there she was sitting on the edge of her bed with her toes running through the carpet next to his face, looking back at him. There she was. He thought about the dinner they had made, and about when it had gotten complicated. He heard somebody coughing behind the walls, as if they were being listened to. She must have heard it too.

Curtis John McRae is editor-in-chief at Yolk Literary Journal. His fiction has appeared in The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Chronicling the Days anthology (Guernica Editions, 2021), and others. Quietly, Loving Everyone is his debut short story collection. He lives in Montreal.

Photo of Curtis John McRae by Matthew Khalili.