First Challenge: And the winner is...

Heather O'Neill has chosen our first Stranger Than Fiction challenge winner (theme: unusual childhood). She reveals her choice below.

It was honestly very difficult to pick a winner from the stories that were sent in. There were so many exquisite snapshots of Canadian childhoods. They captured the trauma and hilarity of being a child in this mad world. There was a father who believed that his car was a sinking ship. There was a man who was raised by carnies. There was a thirteen-year-old girl trying to get lost in Paris. There was a girl who baked brownies on her Easy Bake Oven for a family of traveling dwarves.

The top story is about a grandmother coping with the loss of her husband. The author captures her sense of grief by detailing an anecdote that is unsettling, shocking and humorous. By not shying away from the way that his grandmother actually behaved, in very few words, the author reveals how odd and impossible it is to live with, and to lose, one another.

As a young kid I spent a lot of time sitting with my grandparents in their small kitchen while my Granny chain-smoked Craven A cigarettes. We would all drink Maxwell House coffee, eat European pastry and play endless hands of German cards. All of this was great fun until my grandfather died and my Granny started to ask me to chop her head off every time I visited her on Saturday afternoons.

The first time she led me by the hand out to her garage I thought that Granny wanted me to grab a shovel so that I could do some work on her huge tulip garden that always seemed to be growing. "Here, Frankie, take this and chop," my grandmother directed me, handing me an old axe. Without thinking, I grabbed it from her smoke-stained hands and looked around for some wood or something that needed chopping. "But what do you want me to cut, Granny?" I asked. Without dropping the cigarette that was dangling from her mouth, my grandmother bent her semi-mummified body so that her head was leaning over a wooden stump that was used to cut firewood. "Here," she said pointing to the back of her wrinkled neck. "I want you to cut me here." Her husband, my poppa, had told me he wouldn't be around for much longer. The day after he told me, he died in his sleep. My Granny never forgave him for telling me, and I was supposed to end her shame.