I just read Anne Baldo’s ‘This is Your Sign to Leave Him’, which was an honourable mention in the MRB Fiction Contest. The story is published in Volume 47, Number 2, of Prairie Fire.

The story should have won that contest.

I won’t denigrate the winning piece (Annick Macaskill’s ‘With Friends’), which is a very good piece of fiction and entirely deserving, but ‘This is Your Sign to Leave Him’ is exceptional. Highly encourage you to read it.

The overriding question of obsession runs strongly through this story, and honestly, the build of that obsession to the meeting we wanted right from the start lands in a way I wasn’t quite expecting. Don’t we all have obsessions, sometimes even people? Folks we think on long after they leave our lives, because they’ve made an indelible impression? Where does that get us? Is it even okay?

The part about this story that cemented it for me is the cosmic allusion, the sense that maybe obsession (and perhaps not love) can move through generations and lifetimes, a reincarnated force of nature that endures no matter what our form. This is the part I love about the story, the thought that somehow we dwell on that cosmic level, are part of it, and endure through it – but not all our parts. Just this obsession, this drive. A compulsion that we can’t live without, it seems. Where does that even come from? That’s the question I asked as I got to the end of this story.

Wonderful fiction expands beyond the words on the page. This story manages that, and I’m still thinking on it, and now I’m writing about it. The thought stays with me: thank goodness for great fiction like this. It’s inspiring. It asks big questions and makes a reader wonder. And that’s all I ever want, the ability to wonder, to ratchet a story about two people into a conversation about everything.