The First Page Challenge 2024—1st place

Congrats to Liam Keller for winning first place in the First Page Challenge 2024! Here's what our judge (Michelle Barker) had to say:

"Congratulations to the author of Fill Your Pockets with Stones. I was blown away by this one, mainly because of the number of times the author did something unexpected, either with voice or language. Whether it was the unusual (but effective) word choices, a fine sense of rhythm, or the odd details that won me over, I wanted to read more."

Fill Your Pockets with Stones

On our mother’s forty-third, Jimmy raced his coarse hands down the eighty-eight keys of a Steinway baby grand, which, even now, sits vaguely taboo in a cream-coloured room of our home. Each day at four the room is sticky with marmalade light. Light that goes on bleeding and wringing its hands and finally disappears without having touched anyone. We can’t afford to have spare rooms, but it remains. His performance featured such an especially pretty kind of disdain that a hint of it lingered creepily around the premises for one thousand days while he was gone, from the very next morning on. He wore: black. His eyes were rich and dark and old like soil under new snow.

Almost three years Jimmy was gone; I counted once and it was precisely one thousand days. It’s impossible to say whether he planned that. That’s just something he might or might not have done. Mom was always a little bats, and for three years when it rained heavily and other unknowable factors aligned she would careen into a mood and buy smoked meat and that afternoon she’d bake a rhubarb pie, and then she’d ask my sister and me to shower before dinner, although we’d showered in the morning, and the table would be set with one too many plates because Jimmy was coming home. And then, after, my mother would never cry or capitulate in any way she’d call indulgent, but usually said, “I had a weird feeling,” which made me nauseous each time.

I knew that Jimmy wasn’t coming back for a while. Not for any interesting reason, but because this place was too dull for him. And it is dull. It is dull here not in the right ways, but in the wrong ones, in ways that are suburban and safe and lack character. It was character Jimmy was after, something like that, and he could be cruel trying to find it. Then again, this place was cruel to him sometimes. I think it fascinated him, a place being cruel. He said to me one day: cruelty has us on a leash. That was later, but anyway, even then, while he was gone, I knew he’d be back, I knew he’d walk through the door eventually, probably casually. Smiling and eating a stone fruit, or something.

Liam Keller is a technical and creative writer based in Toronto. His short fiction uses elements of surrealism to highlight the alienation of his young adult protagonists―his work has been published in journals such as Sunspot Lit and Meet Me at 19th Street. Most recently, he was the joint winner of the 2024 Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2024 Fish Publishing Short Story Prize. In his spare time, he cooks, runs, and works on his ever-developing first novel.