The Promise of Water

Water inundates the lives of the characters in these Vancouver Island stories. A tree cutter, from atop a giant fir overlooking a sweeping ocean view, urinates into his wealthy customer's flowerbed. A foster child is haunted by the image of a dying seal. A woman in a kayak, troubled by a falling out she's had with her brother, negotiates ubiquitous rollers off the west coast. In 1923, a woman loses her husband to a coalmine disaster and, a hundred years later, a young mother protests a coalmine just as her estranged husband returns from the oil sands. The ephemeral quality of life, like that of water, is revealed. People die, dreams are shattered, love and redemption are found in letting go.

Judy LeBlanc is a fiction writer from Fanny Bay, Vancouver Island. She has a number of stories published in Canadian literary journals, has won the Antigonish Review’s fiction contest, and was longlisted for the CBC short story prize in 2013.