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Amazon First Novel Award

“Space Between Certainties”

The winning story in the Youth Short Story category of the 2026 Amazon Canada First Novel Award

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Nandini Parihar, 17, is a student from Guelph, Ontario. Her work has been recognized by Vocamus Press and Teen ETCH Magazine for its thoughtful approach to the messier parts of life. Outside of writing, Nandini paints, swims, and hopes to pursue a career in law, where she plans to put her curiosity and love of debate to good use. She believes the most interesting questions are those without simple answers and is committed to exploring them through her writing.

The teacup had a crack running through it like a river carved into ancient stone. Maya traced it with her thumb while the water muttered itself toward boiling, feeling the rough kiss of broken porcelain that had been glued back together with such devotion that it held liquid without betrayal. Her grandmother had mended it seventeen years ago, after Maya, age seven, had sent it spinning from the counter while lunging for the honey jar. The gold repair—kintsugi, though neither of them had known the word then—caught the late afternoon light bleeding through the kitchen window, alchemizing flaw into vein, wound into wealth.

“Some things are more beautiful for having been broken,” her grandmother had said as an objective fact, the same way she said everything: plainly, as if the world were self-evident in its braided complications.

Maya was thirty-four now, standing in what had been her grandmother’s kitchen and was now simply the kitchen, existing without ownership in that strange way places do after someone dies, like a coat still holding the shape of shoulders, still exhaling the ghost of a body. The kettle shrieked. She poured water over the tea bag—black tea, bitter as penance, the way her grandmother had always made it, though Maya had spent her twenties performing preference for green, weak, barely steeped. Preferences, she’d learned, were often just auditions for the person you wanted to become, while the body remembered what it actually craved like an old scar remembering rain.

Outside, the November sky was doing that thing it did in late afternoon where you couldn’t tell if it was clearing or gathering itself for violence. The clouds were grey but luminous, pregnant with light they refused to deliver. Liminal, her friend Jacob would say. Jacob collected words like that—liminal, interstitial, penumbral—words that described the between-places. He said he needed language for states that weren’t one thing or another because that’s where he’d been living since his divorce, in the space between married and single, between father and weekend father, between the architecture of who he’d been and the rubble of whoever he was becoming.

“Binary thinking,” he’d said once, sprawled on this same kitchen floor while her grandmother made soup, “is just laziness wearing the costume of clarity. The world doesn’t come in either-or. It comes in infinite variations, and we’re the ones who draw the lines and pretend they were always there.”

Her grandmother had nodded, stirring. “The Japanese have a word—ma. It means the space between things, the gap that gives them meaning. The essential pause. The breath that makes the music.”

Maya sipped her tea now and burned her tongue, the same patch on the right side she always burned, the one that had probably gone numb to everything except this specific flavour of foolishness. Pain and comfort arriving together, neither canceling the other out, just braiding like hair.

She’d come back to sort through things, the executor of an estate that consisted mainly of objects worn smooth by decades of devotion: chipped plates that still held food without apology, sheets washed so many times they were soft as the skin inside your wrist, books whose spines had cracked open to favourite pages like open, inviting, embracing arms. The lawyer had given her six months to clear the house before it sold, as if grief had a reasonable timeline, as if you could schedule the dismantling of a life the way you scheduled an oil change.

In the living room, boxes stood half-filled, her sorting system hemorrhaging. She’d started with keep, donate, trash, but every object held too many contexts. The crocheted blanket was ugly, truly ugly, a vomit-green that hurt to look at. But her grandmother had made it during chemotherapy, when her hands needed something to do besides tremble like leaves before storm. Trash or keep? The question assumed you could separate utility from history, beauty from love.

She picked up a wooden spoon from the counter, its handle darkened with age and oil, shaped by years of palms into something that fit a hand like prayer. Her grandmother had used it for everything:........

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