‘We Walked on Water’ won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2013. In rhythmical, virtuoso prose Robertson depicts how a young triathlete travels to the Penticton Ironman, the place where his sister Liv died during the race one year before. The story opens with an onimous description of the scenery during the bus ride. The boy recounts how they made ‘a week of it’ last year. How they counted calories, stuck to nutrition plans, but also how they enjoyed paddling in the kayak of his aunt on the lake. He muses on how the triathlon started, the scrum in the water. And how he rushed to his bicycle and looked for his sister – in vain. But there is some murmur on his memories. The story is disturbed by medspeak on Liv’s cardiac arrhythmia and the sobering fact that only his aunt will pick him up at the terminal this year. With her kayak.

The story does not contain a logical structure, but everything is interwoven. You discover in dribs and drabs what happened. You smell the atmosphere, the nature, the juicy lingo of the athletes, the dry medspeak. As a reader you slide silently from past to present and back again. You go with the flow. Just like grief also comes in waves. It’s like waiting, the boy says, waiting for the plot twist that will never come.