The Short of It: Mikka Jacobsen & Good Victory

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.

Mikka Jacobsen: Good Victory is a collection of coming-of-age stories. The book has a mood of ’90s nostalgia and unfolds in what the inimitable Adèle Barclay has described as “a suburban gothic landscape.” There are malls. There are basements. There are high school dances. There are mood rings. There are psychics. There are amusement parks. There are flashers. There are ghosts. The plots hinge on moments where one might strangle or rescue her impulses and desires—or be strangled or rescued by them—for better or worse.

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

MJ: My stories are often seeded in an autobiographical detail, however small, and bloom from there into something wholly fictional. The story “Home of the Griffins,” for example, sprung from a memory of a high school friend who saw his brother and another boy throwing beer bottles at each other in the street. Happily, as a kind of game. I don’t know why this anecdote stayed with me for so many years. Perhaps because the image itself is so striking, what it reveals about masculinity and male friendships, and the palpable conflation of play and brutality. Exploring this memory, expanding on it fictionally, led me to reflect on young friendships—how they sustain and form and devastate us. Though it belongs in “Home of the Griffins” to a minor character, and is only spoken of fleetingly, this “game” lives at the heart of the narrative. It reflects, in its bravado and violence and youthful stupidity, an opposing tenderness, and poses a question of two brothers who are sublimely different. How did these boys arrive at this moment? How did they become the way they are? Questions of identity, of nature and nurture, are ones that occupy my thinking and animate my stories.

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

MJ: I love the form’s attention to language. I love its ambiguity. I love its condensation. I love how the best stories are constructed to feel inevitable. Without intending to, I read stories more alertly than novels, more with my brain than my heart. I find the intellectual challenge of the short story immensely pleasurable. And the weirder, for me, the better. I can go along more easily with strangeness, opaqueness, horror, depravity—all fictional moods I love—in the story form. Maybe in a story’s brevity these modes are easier to relish. I love that stories don’t require, and in fact resist, a resolution.

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

MJ: I like stories that blend the ordinary and the extraordinary. I like vibrantly weird characters and supernatural, fantastical plots that somehow manage to feel entirely real. I like freakish transformations and surprising metamorphoses. I like the mystical. Some writers I deeply admire who write strangely and beautifully are Barbara Gowdy, Carmen Maria Machado, Samantha Hunt, Joy Williams, Silvina Ocampo, Shirley Jackson, Amparo Dávila, Louise Erdrich.

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

MJ: An array of crystals for good vibes. A tiny brass frog for good luck. A dictionary and a thesaurus for good ergonomics.

From the story “Home of the Griffins.”

Eliot is making gagging noises. “I’m dying. I’m dying,” he keeps saying, holding his throat. I laugh, though I don’t really think it’s funny. He grabs my hand to steer us through the crowded hallway.

“I have class,” I say, like a rudderless ship.

But when the door to the back field opens, I can’t trade the afternoon’s sun-bleached freedom for the musty biology lab in the basement, even though Mr. Shivji is my favour­ite teacher. Last Monday we did an experiment where the whole class measured my pulse, and after I smoked a cig­arette outside, we took my pulse again. My heart rate was abnormal, but it could’ve been nerves, with Mr. Shivji’s warm fingers against my wrist and everyone silent as he counted my heartbeats aloud. It was meant to be a lesson for everyone, but Mr. Shivji doesn’t make you feel bad even when you’re the example. He just gives you the biological facts and lets you choose for yourself.

Two gulls flicker to the grass, peck, and flap. Eliot lobs a twig. Beside the chain-link fence between the field and the freeway, I’m on my back jawing smoke haloes. My mood ring glows violet with blackish edges, the colour of a bruise. Eliot gave me the ring for my last birthday. I think it was an apology for the time he laughed when I told him my favourite movie was My Girl. The girl in the movie lives in a funeral home and wants to be a writer. She wears a bro­ken mood ring that belonged to her dead mother. One day the girl loses the ring, and her best friend, Macaulay Culkin, goes to find it. While he’s looking, he gets swarmed by bees. He’s allergic, and he dies, too. When they find his body, he’s wearing the mood ring, and its colour has changed from black to blue.

I keep my ring’s paper legend folded in my pocket even though I know the codes by heart. Purple? Positive Colour: Amorous, Heat, Mischievous, Dreamer, Sensual. But on the other hand, Black? Black means Fear, Nothing, Angst, Stormy, Depressed, Intense, Secretive. Some of the moods (i.e., Nothing) are less than helpful. I adjust my posture, tilt my chin. Intense Mischievous Dreamer. Secretive. Perhaps a touch but not overly Stormy.

Eliot elbows me and takes the cigarette. Flipping the hair from his eyes, he reminds me of a bathing bird. As a rule, when he’s not smoking, Eliot keeps his hands in the pockets of his lambskin jacket. He can afford the jacket because his mom is a judge.

“You wouldn’t believe how it stretches.” He gasps. “It’s so bloody. And the hair?” His lips form a prissy frown. He makes that gagging noise again. In his third-period Career and Life Management class, they watched a video of a real woman giving birth. Eliot won’t stop recounting the details. “It was traumatizing,” he says. Eliot’s been going to therapy since he met me and started “acting out.” Now, he describes everything as traumatic.

In their blue sweat shorts and grey T-shirts with the griffin on the front, the students in Ms. Tolomeo’s gym class are placing goal-post pylons and kicking soccer balls. Half lion and half eagle, our mascot, Ms. Tolomeo told us, is a magnificent creature known to guard priceless posses­sions. No one on the field looks particularly priceless.

“How’s Becky?” I ask, sounding mean. I’m feeling nause­ated from all the nicotine.

“How’s Jaspreet?” Eliot replies.

Eliot met Becky at group therapy. I’ve never met her, but I know they’ve never had sex because Eliot’s “waiting for college.” When I ask if he’s told Becky about the Halloween dance, Eliot pulls up a fistful of grass.

“You know what Beau did last night?”

I shrug and act like my face isn’t burning. Beau is Eliot’s older brother. One night, Eliot fell asleep while we were drinking microwaved caramel schnapps and watching Debbie Does Dallas as a joke. Beau snuck beside me on the couch. He put a finger to his lips — scarred where Eliot hit him with a marshmallow-roasting stick on a camping trip when they were kids — and led me out of the room by my beltloop. Eliot still doesn’t know.

“He and his dumb friend, Roger —” Eliot inflects more than usual when he’s upset “— were in the street throwing beer bottles at each other. A game they made up, apparently. One hit Beau in the face. Our mom is out of town, so I had to drive him to the hospital.” Anytime Eliot realizes he’s said in my vicinity a version of the word mother, his face crum­ples in surprised shock, like he’s dropped a glass and not yet heard it shatter. He seems to think anyone having a mother inflicts some cruelty on me.

“Who won?” I say.

Eliot’s smile is scornful, tight. In the sun, his eyes glow like coins at the bottom of a fountain. Eliot’s irises are two different colours — blue and green — like a husky’s. He searches his pockets for another cigarette.

“Is Beau okay?”

Eliot used that same scornful smile the time he came to school with a black eye. He refused to explain until I pushed him into the bathroom no one uses because it’s haunted by a girl who hanged herself from a stall with her back­pack strap. I dabbed at the bruise with a wet paper towel as Eliot perched sink-side, wincing and breathing against my collarbone. The pipes shuddered, and my skin bristled with goosebumps. “The ghost,” I whispered, but Eliot didn’t laugh. So I dampened and brushed the hair from his tem­ples and held his head so that he was forced to look me in the eyes. He finally told me he’d been jumped the night before at Stampede station. When I asked if they’d stolen anything, he shook his head. When I asked why he thought they did it, his chin trembled.

“How should I know?” he said. “Why does anything happen?”

I was so mad right then. Not, like you might think, at the assailants, but at Eliot — his tiny chest, his dancer’s gait — that I balled the paper towel into a hard wad and spat against the mirror. Eliot scowled. “Real nice, Chloe. Real ladylike.”

On the back field, I stare into the beady eye of a seagull. Hello in there?

“Of course Beau’s fine,” Eliot says. “Nothing bad ever happens to him.”

Mikka Jacobsen is a fiction and nonfiction writer from Calgary, Alberta. Her work has appeared in Joyland, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, subTerrain, Canadian Notes & Queries, The Missouri Review, and Literary Hub, among others. Her essay collection, Modern Fables, was published in 2022. Good Victory is her first collection of stories.

Photo of Mikka by Emma Palm.