High School, our 20th issue, is on the way. To cel­e­brate, we’re pub­lish­ing a series of fic­tion and illus­tra­tion that cel­e­brate those teenage times for what they were–glorious, hope­less, funny, mov­ing, or just plain embarrassing.

BLACK SAGE BENCH
By Curtis LeBlanc

One is English and the other is French is what the neighbour says about his dogs. They run along the rows of grapevines tangled around wooden stakes and wire. At the end of the day he calls to one dog come here and the other vient ici and they both come running to him faster than most have ever ran for anyone.

For the entire summer before her senior year, the girl works for him, picking weeds and pruning vines in the Okanagan heat. She’ll take being alone outdoors over spooning gelato for retirees and tourists. There are slivers in her hands that she will never get out, and she’s tanned like the keys of a piano between the straps of her overalls, camisole, and bra. She wakes at sunrise every morning, gets dressed, and walks with her breakfast across the gravel road between the two properties to the neighbour’s work shed.

Her father sits at the patio table all morning, all afternoon, whistling along to pop-country songs coming through the portable radio. He waits for it to pass, for the heat to subside on the banks of Skaha Lake, and drinks bottles by the case, bottles of wine made from the grapes that the neighbour has worked so hard to grow.

He never asks the girl about her day, though she figures he may like to hear about it. In a year it will be the grapes that she cared for bringing colour to his face, keeping his lips wet for the whistle, holding him up in wine country.

Curtis LeBlanc was born and raised in St. Albert, Alberta. He currently lives in Vancouver where he is an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia. Recently, he was a runner-up in Broken Pencil’s Unearth Your Underworld fiction contest. His writing has appeared in Poetry is Dead, The Maynard, Existere, Joyland, Little Fiction, Sport Literate, and is forthcoming in Prairie Fire.

Amelia Garvin is a painter and illus­tra­tor who has exhib­ited her work in group shows across Van­cou­ver. She has a BFA from Emily Carr. See more work by Amelia here and here.