The Moth Short Story Prize 2021

“Janice Deal’s Lost City is such a good story, dimensional, far-reaching, with a strangeness that feels true,” said Ali Smith of her chosen winner of The Moth Short Story Prize.

Lost City by Janice Deal

They used to call their mother Key Lime Pie, because of her penchant for going off to a timeshare in Florida without them, and because for a long time they thought the name was funny. Rex stopped using it before his sister Claire did; this was around the time their mother went to Florida with Art, one of her boyfriends, to get married. At least it seemed that way to Rex later, when he tried to remember how it was when he was still nice.

Whenever Rex’s mother disappeared to Florida, usually for a month, sometimes longer, Rex and Claire were left in the care of their grandmother, a stout, diabetic woman whose only child was Rex’s father, Key Lime’s second husband. Technically Granny was really only Rex’s granny. Key Lime had been married once before, to Claire’s father, an alcoholic who had left little Claire and Key Lime Pie in the lurch. Good riddance to bad rubbish, Key Lime was fond of saying about her exes. She’d divorced them both.

There was no love between Key Lime and Granny, but Granny still came. A widow, she chain-smoked and cooked exactly two things for the children: pasta in a watery red sauce made from tomato soup, and something she called meatloaf. The day after meatloaf nights, Rex and Claire each got a thick slice, marbled with fat, in their lunchboxes, packed with bread-and-butter pickles and a slice of white bread. They routinely threw this food away on the way to school; Claire, who had a job at McDonald’s, always came up with money for the cafeteria for them both. The high school Claire attended was situated right next to Rex’s grammar school. They both took the bus; Claire rode with her own friends, but she always made sure Rex had money before she took her seat.

She tries, was something Claire said about their grandmother. And the house was in fact cleaner when Granny was in charge. When she came to stay she’d bring her cat, Good Boy, a fat one-eyed tom that liked no one but Granny and, sometimes, Rex. Granny would play cards with Rex after school too: War usually. Granny had not gone past the sixth grade but she knew things. She taught Rex how to field strip a cigarette, for example. She would stop in her cleaning or mending to tell him about patterns in nature.

Art was the boyfriend with the timeshare, and the October Rex was in third grade, Key Lime announced that she was going to Florida to marry him because, as she said, the third time was the charm. Claire and Rex were not invited: ‘Plane fare isn’t cheap, honey bun,’ Key Lime told them. Claire sniffed and left the room, but Rex felt obliged to give his mother a hug. ‘That’s my boy,’ Key Lime said. She worked at a dry cleaner’s but because Art was the owner, getting time off for the wedding proved to be no problem.

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