2026 Schalk

2026 "London" Literary Prizes Canadian Prose Winner

$200 CAN prize

Counter-Illumination

by Owen Schalk

There’s a story I need to tell, but I don’t know where to start, so I’ll begin with the squid.

The footage is silent. I’ve watched it a thousand times. It starts with blackness, the black of outer space, of an iris an inch away from your own. Far away, tiny grains of light flash then vanish like almost-spoken secrets. In the lower tenth of the screen, a metal arm extends toward the black, and at the arm’s end there’s a disc rimmed with white dots that light pinwheels through, around and around. It reminds me of a sped-up planet in orbit, the spinning cursor of a stalled computer. Jason rolling his eyes. Blackness dwarfs the ring of light, takes up the whole screen, watches unimpressed as the optical lure twirls in pleading, hoping for response.

Six seconds in – twenty-four if you watch on 0.25 speed – there’s movement. A strand of white snakes out of the darkness. Just one? No, it flowers into a chaos of arms lined with luminous suckers, growing larger as they craze toward the camera. A single limb flops over the lure, smothering its twirl of light, and a second later – or four seconds – the giant squid pushes backward in a splay of retreat, drowning itself in black, not to be fooled.

The doctors told us the first year is especially dangerous for surviving twins. “Co-twin” was their word for twin, which I found needlessly complicated because everyone already knows twins are a combination, a unit of obscure relations, hidden disclosures, like whales in the ocean or a two-person beehive. The doctors showed us charts, percentages, brain scans, all of which communicated that Jason was more likely than not to kill himself by year’s end.

Myra and me adopted the twins when they were six years old. They were short for their age, and lanky, something they were always self-conscious about. I differentiated them by their eyes, both deep brown, though Johnny’s were deeper. If Jason’s eyes were cups of coffee, Johnny’s were Grand Canyons in the dead of night, spacious and historical, hypnotizing in a way that made me feel tiny. When I looked into Johnny’s eyes, I wondered what it’s like to not know your parents, thought selfishly for a split-second that it must be freeing, then felt ashamed of my assumption. Never assume, that’s what Child and Family Services told us. When you make assumptions about the children, you take ownership of a past that isn’t yours. The children are in front of you, lit up by thirty-watt fluorescent bulbs, but when you make assumptions, you don’t see them. Only yourself.

We wanted kids because Myra wanted them. When we learned I’m sterile, I thought that would be the matter’s end, until she started talking about adoption. CFS judged us respectable enough to take the twins home within a month of us first meeting them in the facility’s white-walled recreation room, blocky blue couches and red plastic chairs. Jason rustled a pile of unformed Legos as Johnny sat on the floor and stared canyon-eyed at me, like he was trying to involve me in something I should have understood by now. The TV played a cartoon I’d never seen before, in which a monkey fell off a biplane and tried to break his fall with an umbrella.

The twins lived according to their own rhythm, which we expected. The problem was we didn’t know where to start with them. Their lives had begun without me and Myra, so we were totally in the dark, architects with a blueprint that didn’t match the foundation. I made them do the same things my dad had shoved me into, but the twins didn’t like hockey or baseball or curling, didn’t make friends even though we pushed them into every club under the sun save Girl Guides. They only wanted each other’s company. They were inseparable, and once separated, they sank into gloomy silence that most teachers and classmates mistook for trauma or depression or fetal alcohol syndrome (a term I didn’t know was problematic). They were boys with inner lives eclectic and unreachable, like the strange kids we all grow up with and think about decades later and wonder how they ever functioned on their own. With the twins, the answer, I guess, is that they didn’t.

After Johnny’s death, Jason got into squids. He was twenty years old and lived at home. He got fired from Walmart because he missed too many shifts to watch videos of glass squids making themselves invisible, or firefly squids glowing in counter-illumination, or the same twenty-second clip of a giant squid off the coast of Japan, 2,000 feet beneath the north Pacific, footage captured in 2013 by a deep-sea camera and a bioluminescent lure that mimicked the swirling lights of a jellyfish.

I woke up one night, hungover, and shuffled into the kitchen for water. Johnny had died a month before. The TV was on, but black, and on its sixty-inch screen the giant squid emerged, flailing its limbs like a biblical beast, and I was so horrified I had to turn away. Jason sat on the couch, bags under his eyes, staring at the screen. When the video was over, he grabbed the remote and hit play.

Growing up, the twins had lots of fleeting obsessions, so I didn’t think much of Jason’s squid fixation. He told me about different squids, or cephalopods as he put it, like the northern pygmy squid, native to the west Pacific, that grows to just over half an inch – a squid the size of a cat’s claw. The glass squid (four to five inches) has transparent skin, its digestive gland afloat in the ammonium chloride that fills its bulbous body. When danger nears, it pours ink into itself and disappears. Then there’s the giant squid. Nobody knows how many exist. Forty feet long, it’s the loner of the deep, writhing through darkness without companionship, feeding on fish and shrimp and other squids. It wasn’t photographed in its natural environment until 2004.

At eight years old, the twins developed an interest in trains. They drew boxcars, dressed as conductors on Halloween, even hopped trains and went missing for a day until I received a call from police in Saskatoon or Brandon or Kenora and had to drive through the night to fetch them, lonely headlights clutching highway in the crushing prairie night. At eleven years old, they got into wild berries – ate them, renamed them, went to the ER more than once for stomach pumps. At fourteen, it was paleontology; they begged to visit Drumheller Museum, and to excavate the backyard for dinosaur bones. At sixteen, worms. Talks with counselors provided little insight. We couldn’t understand the boys, or what they were searching for.

When the twins turned eighteen, they obsessed over planes, though not piloting. They pooled their earnings from their gas station jobs, bought a second-hand Cessna, and tried to fly it without taking a single class. They wanted to find something, and decided it must have been in the sky. They crashed. The only injury was a bruise on Jason’s chin.

Near the end of Johnny’s life, the twins fixated on bodybuilding. They decided that all their problems, their inability to fit in, the hostility of the world outside their self-contained tide-pool lives, was the result of diminutive stature. Because they were short and skinny, the twins decided that people’s eyes glazed over them like they were firefly squids camouflaged against the ocean’s surface, so they needed to make themselves stand out. They lived at the gym for months on end. In our bathroom garbage can, I found empty steroid needles. Their muscles bulged through too-small shirts. They got into fights, clambered home at night with black eyes and bloody knuckles. I always wondered, who were they fighting? Maybe the better question is, what were they fighting?

The distance between me and the twins widened. It was already too wide for Myra’s liking, so she sat us down and pleaded with our quiet, bruised-up boys to divulge what was wrong with them. They didn’t answer. Johnny’s eyes met mine, and I plummeted into them like I always did, like a diver into an ocean of molasses, then I looked into Jason’s eyes and they were as shallow as an ankle-puddle. I considered what that distinction meant. Part of me believed the depth of Johnny’s eyes exposed him as the mastermind of their obsessions and Jason as the empty-headed follower who had no wishes of his own. Though maybe the difference in their eyes conveyed the opposite. Maybe it meant nothing.

Later, the doctors told us that side effects of steroid abuse include hair loss, fatigue, and depression. They were linking the steroids to Johnny’s death, but I wasn’t convinced. There was another reason he died, and I wasn’t privy to it, because I wasn’t a “co-twin.”

At the Smithsonian, there’s a giant squid’s eye in a jar. It was found off the Florida coastline in a squid corpse looted by birds, fish, and sharks. Somehow the eye had been left untouched. Litres of isopropyl alcohol hold the specimen, maybe the only giant squid’s eye in the world that’s been preserved. It’s white and meaty, the size of a soccer ball, the largest eye of any known organism. Despite its size, it looks unremarkable, a ring of white dolloped with black. But it’s not the simplicity of the eye that intrigues me. It’s the fact that the pupil absorbed photons of light hundreds of metres below the ocean’s surface, light I’ll never see. It’s the millions of years of evolution that trained the eye to pick flecks of bioluminescence from the blackness, to pry light from dark. Just like my eyes. Just like Jason and Johnny’s.

Six months after Johnny’s death, Jason quit steroids and found a new obsession. He wanted to find his parents. He went to CFS and asked for their records, last known address and so on, and CFS asked me if I consented for Jason to be shown where he came from. Sure, I said. I’d long ago given up on trying to understand Jason’s fixations, or keep him from them. So they gave him an address, and he visited, alone. When he returned that night, he didn’t say a word to us. He scarfed down a supper of mashed potatoes, green beans, and chicken breast, then retreated to his bedroom to watch squid videos.

At 9PM, on Myra’s urging, I knocked on Jason’s door. He didn’t answer, but I opened it and said, “Your mother wants to know how it went.”

Laying on the bed, knees raised to prop up the iPad, Jason rolled his eyes.

“How many times,” he said, “have we asked you for help?”

I leaned on the doorjamb and watched him watch the giant squid. Maybe the steroids had churned his brain chemistry. He hadn’t asked me for help once.

Over the next few weeks, Jason left the house a lot. He didn’t have a job, and we didn’t know where he went. To his parents’ house? Somewhere else? I stopped asking. Then one night he came home burdened by a new kind of silence, not withdrawn but reflective. He sat on the couch beside my loveseat and watched the Jets game with me. Wordless and blinking. He turned to me and said, “I understand why you raised us the way you did.”

“What does that mean?”

“I visited Grandpa. I asked him about what it was like for you, growing up…”

“If you bring him up again,” I said, “I’ll throw you out of this goddamn house for good.”

It’s better to end here than where the story actually ended. I’m still a police officer, Myra a math teacher. We do what we can for each other. At night, when I’m watching the same squid videos that Jason used to, I think about the past. I wonder if there’s something about me, something threaded through my veins, that turns events against me. That’s what my dad used to say about me when he had a load on. I still hear him sometimes, reaching through history to tell me how useless I am, how maladjusted and weak, his words like the limbs of a giant squid reaching out of blackness to remind me there’s so much out there I’ll never understand, so much I’ve never seen that I should dread.

Owen Schalk is a writer from Manitoba, Treaty 1 Territory. He is the author of four books on imperialism and Canadian foreign policy, most recently Targeting Libya (Lorimer Books). In 2025, he received the Paul Beingessner Award for Excellence in Writing, the National Farmers Union's annual literary prize.