Excerpt from Issue 306 (Winter 2026)
"Faultline" by Ariadne Asho
Winner of The Fiddlehead's 2025 Fiction Contest
The car stopped at a field full of houses. Houses like autumn squash. Houses like spiral-rolled bales of hay.
Aoife scuffed across the earthy corduroy of the back seat, against wide wales that trapped within them cracker crumbs, cat-fur strands, rustcoloured pine needles. Her sister Lilou — reedy, blondie Lilou — gamboled out the other side, to face the field and a muddy ditch of clay and granite.
Beside the ditch, Lilou chewed the ear of her stuffed bear, who by now had the appearance of a used rag; matted fur and bare netting where fur had once been. Their mother held Sal. He screamed, fought — like an anguished worm destined for the hook. Sal was often red as a tomato, mucus down his face. Like he’d been born crying, and no one had ever taught him how to stop.
Beyond the car and around the houses was scrub and brush, tufted clumps of grass. Pale sky and flat air; the woolly absence of sound. The field itself balded in places: large swaths where the earth was packed hard like pavement. A row of trees surrounded the field: bristly, sparse; interrupted by electrical lines, a radio tower, chain-link fencing. The car they left at the side of the speckled road. Occasionally another vehicle swooshed past, kicked up ashy cloud, red lights faded into distance by the time Aoife and her family turned to see.
Their mother stooped to set Sal at the roadside, but he kicked his rainboots wildly and grasped at her clothes. He shrieked, bawled, tried to heave himself back into her arms. Their father walked ahead. In the level air he flicked a lighter over and over. Aoife’s father’s back was to the rest; wordless, rambling strides as he distanced himself, transfixed by something in the distance. Aoife’s mother grabbed roughly at Sal’s tiny fists. Then she left him in the gravel with Aoife and Lilou, patted smooth her feathery hair, hurried to close the gap between her and their father.
In the car Aoife’s parents had spoken of their plans for the house, the one they’d find that day. The houses in the field were going for cheap; they’d be out of that apartment in no time.
“We’ll bury the house in the side of the hill,” Aoife’s mother had said. “Like hobbits. Just need somewhere for it to go. Idyllic, with hills.”
“Your parents have land,” said Aoife’s father.
Aoife’s mother turned the dial for the radio.
The image of a house buried in a hill recalled for Aoife the Oatman family in The Edge of Violet Brook, which she’d read four times through. It summoned up the sod house, that dugout in Linden Grove, where the Oatmans ironed spiders and centipedes out of their walls, loam lined with newspaper. Aoife hoped they wouldn’t have to iron spiders out of the walls of their new house.
Aoife’s parents checked that there was no one else around, so they could visit freely the houses in the field. Aoife took Lilou’s hand. Little Lilou smelled of milk, and skipped and whirled, and in doing so tugged and wrenched Aoife’s arm in every direction. Behind them, Sal faltered, flushed and salt-strewn, uneven steps on his legs like cased sausages. His boots were on the wrong feet.
The houses perched upon pillars of what looked like Jenga blocks, long steel beams. The empty space below was about the same height as Aoife, maybe taller. She stood and listened for birds or crickets but heard only a faint buzzing hum that seemed to come from within the earth itself.
At the closest house, they lifted themselves one by one, save Sal — pale, wailing, cherry-tomato Sal — up to the door, more than a meter off the ground, where there might have been a porch or deck. They did it the way Aoife’s mother had showed them in their grandparents’ haybarn: hands planted firmly up at the ledge, they hoisted themselves skyward, swung a leg, shifted their weight over and in.
Aoife’s mother had been a gymnast. She’d won medals and trophies. And she’d learned everything she knew in that haybarn. Her own parents had built her a trapeze, a vault, a balance beam. As a child herself, in those halcyon days of the nineteen-eighties, Aoife’s mother thought the saltos, the double-twists, the elements of flight: these would be her one-way ticket. Her special passport to a bright, vivid future.
When Aoife and Lilou were old enough, their mother would bring them to the haybarn and show the girls how to somersault and handspring, how to do the splits. If they got good, they might someday go to the Olympics. They might compete in places like Sydney, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Seoul. But Aoife couldn’t learn the flips and balances. She was hesitant, frightened she might fall, lose a tooth. And Lilou was simply too dreamy. She was interested in something else, whatever she wasn’t doing. So instead, the sisters used that barn like a giant set of building blocks, rearranging bales to create covered wagons, sailing ships, magical castles, burrows for bunny rabbits.
The first house they entered was spare and empty; grimy white walls and piling ochre carpet. The linoleum in the kitchen and hallways peeled and buckled, the cabinets absent their doors. The whole place smelled strongly of lemon cleaner, of mothballs and paint left to curdle. Along one wall, grey light poured through giant windows, and across from them was a complex arrangement of particleboard shelves, slightly askew. Aoife’s mother called it a bungalow, that house shaped like a long rectangle with no stairs going up or down. She said those shelves would be good for their unschooling. They’d fill them with books about all sorts of things. The unschooling had begun the year before. The schools, Aoife’s mother said, were full of technocrats. They were dens of lice and pollution, of something called polarization. In those schools they wanted desperately to cleave children of their imaginations; to remove them from the natural world.
Privately, Aoife missed school. She missed swirling her hand through the bin of translucent multicolour coins, drawing with tempera paint on large sheets of beige paper, weighed down so they didn’t curl in at the corners. She missed climbing on the Rainbow, that arc-shaped structure of wood and rope, where she could dangle upside down and let the scraggly ends of her hair brush the woodchips. She missed playing with the other children, their made-up games where they each acted a different part: the mother, the father, the cat, the dog, the bird in a cage. Those games always ended once the bell rang and they lined up to cross the street and return to the tall brick building. But they’d do it again the next day, in some different configuration. This time Aoife would be the mother. Next time she might be the cat.
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— Ariadne Asho grew up on Vancouver Island and now lives in Montreal. Her work has appeared in The New Quarterly, and her stories were longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize twice, in 2023 and 2025. She is currently working on a collection of short fiction.
Read the rest of "Faultline" in Issue 306 (Winter 2026). Order the issue now!
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