Take refuge in Michael Helm's city

Who will win the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (and that $25,000 pot)? Sure, the jurors have their views. But we want to hear yours. This week, read daily clips from the nominated novels, share your views - then, just as the culling is finalized for that Nov. 2 award announcement, tell us who you would eliminate from the race. The contenders: The ultimate sibling rivalry, Kathleen Winter for Annabel and her brother Michael Winter for The Death of Donna Whalen, plus Trevor Cole for Practical Jean, Emma Donoghue for Room - and in today's excerpt, Michael Helm for Cities of Refuge. Cities of Refuge unravels the impact of an attack on a young woman, and her father.

From Cities of Refuge , by Michael Helm

We watch the foreign girl. She's rendered here silent in greys. An automated teller near her west-end apartment at 8:07 p.m. She wears a sort of party dress though no one in her small circle can think where she may have been going. She carries a little purse on a strap over her shoulder, she is petite, diminutives collect around her. We pick her up on an eastbound subway platform at 8:23. For a moment we glimpse a hair clip in a glint as she turns. She doesn't seem to be waiting for anyone. Apparently returning overground she arrives back in her neighbourhood just before 2:00 and buys a lottery ticket for an elderly neighbour as she does once a week in the all-nite variety store only blocks from her building.

The clip is gone, her hair fallen. She has trouble with the clasp on her purse and seems embarrassed and smiles when the clerk says something, though she doesn't make eye contact with him even when she has success and pays and exits the frame with an easy grace we lend her simply because she will never be seen alive again by friends or cameras, by co-workers or anyone in her small circle. She has no family in this country. Then a colour still photo, phone numbers on the screen, a name we can't help but register. The disquiet of this witnessing is there in the pixelated grain.

And we've seen her somewhere and it haunts us. Somewhere in the days we build of marks and remarks, of clocks, hands and faces, or maybe the face we remember is not hers but her double's, a move the big city makes sometimes, echoing forms, gaming with the likenesses of things. In such ways the place remakes itself for us so that at night before sleep we drift through lanes and parks and peer into doorways, spaces we've passed a thousand times without noticing. We look up at a math of windows and there are millions enclosed all around. But we think we've seen her, or know her, or someone we know knows her and we pace back through the week, looking, and what do we find? Women in pairs walking fast in bright downtown streets. A clutch of Arab men speaking at once in a cigar shop on the verges of Chinatown. Some lost son never spoken of propped on a downspout to piss in the streetlight shadows of a house near the Spit. Store clerks. Expectorating neighbours barking on porches. Cabbies' faces staring out above the laminated hack number on the headrest and the face in the rear-view that never looked back, never glanced at us once. A lone rat, quick with a foreknowledge brought miles along the overpass tracks.

And she's nowhere. She was born in the country of a country far off, and she's come all this way to go missing. In an alley where we walk sometimes the businesses have given over their backsides to graffiti artists and the short passage has a kind of end of rainbow charm. Atop the parabolic spank of colours are five brown-hue figures of evolving man, the stoop and brow-ridge receding with the body hair until, at last, like a punchline, the figure of H-Sap as a black kid in jeans, the artist himself, maybe, painting primitive animal shapes on this same wall, the whole thing signed with the mark of a cross inside a circle. The earliest ideogram for the city. It means crossroads within a wall. Something read in a medical waiting room once with dread a faint tang on the tongue.

We wake in the night and the foreign girl's name is with us. A musical name that calls to be spoken. Here beneath a whisper, we consign her to the dark.