Chance Freihaut is the winner of the 2024 Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition. The protagonist, Peter, tries to recover the memory of his mother, who abandoned him when he was seven. To reconstruct what he has lost, he enlists an improv group of three performers and directs them through scenes he invents—assigning places, situations, and even lines of dialogue.
As
the improvisations unfold, fragments of the past begin to surface. Peter
recalls, with painful clarity, the moment his mother left him and his father
for good. “I love you, Peter,” she tells him. “But you need to know something.
Mommy is like the sand and the wind.” And like sand carried off by a gust, she
disappears from his life.
Through
this process, Peter begins to understand his own identity and releases himself
from the long struggle to remember her. A phone‑sex worker known as V
eventually joins the troupe and takes on the role of his mother, further
blurring the boundaries between performance and memory.
The
story moves between two intertwined realms—the real world and the world of
improv. At times, they overlap so closely that the distinction becomes
deliberately unclear. Each sentence carries layers of implication, and each
paragraph hides more than it reveals. The narrative demands an active,
imaginative reader, one willing to navigate its shifting realities.
Hinoki is a tree name. It smells good. For Peter, the fragrance of Hinoki is his mother's smell.
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