Today’s story is “Sailors Lost at Sea”, the 4th piece published in Carol Shield’s Collected Stories. Originally released into the wild in 1985 as part of her first collection, Various Miracles, “Sailors” opens with 14-year old Helene getting locked inside a small-town church. We quickly learn that she and her poet mother have left their native Winnipeg for a year of drifting through hexagon-shaped France. After ten days, they attached themselves “like barnacles” to St Quay, a quiet town on the channel coast.

As our young protagonist contemplates her demise, most likely ending up a dried up skeleton, only identifiable by her bag of schoolbooks, we learn through her thoughts and memories of the life they left behind, the pros and cons of being outsiders in France, of and the titular legend, when the church opens up once a year.

This story is a joy to read, a gem in the treasure chest of Carol Shields’ body of work.

Fun fact: This collection was published when Shields was 50 years old, almost 10 years before she acclaimed international success with her Pulitzer-nominated novel, The Stone Diaries.