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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25647335391165116012017-08-15T10:59:26.447-04:00The Danforth Review21st century literature since 1999 ~ canadian ~ short storiesMichael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-58252472406097854102017-06-13T21:30:00.002-04:002017-06-14T22:14:15.602-04:00Fiction #73New fiction! Issue #73

Prepared by Carole Glasser Langille

Status of Application by Alyson Fortowsky

Fire Built by Christopher Shilts

Taking Possession by David Gerow

Submissions now open for #74 -- coming in September!

Special thanks to all who have been submitting. Enjoy. Michael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-66171439193847261852017-06-13T21:24:00.001-04:002017-06-14T22:31:09.160-04:00Fiction #73: Carole Glasser LangillePrepared

Not only had I escaped an unhappy marriage, but I'd found a great place to live. The living room and kitchen in the old farmhouse were sunny late into the afternoon. It was peaceful living in the country after years in the city. My ex was paying child support which covered rent.

But walls in the old farmhouse weren't insulated and I couldn't afford to heat the place. To help with the cost of oil, I posted an ad to rent one of the rooms. Harrison was the first to respond.

After he looked through the house I showed him the large yard where the previous renters had grown a vegetable garden. My sons Seamus and Dan had just gotten back from elementary school and were playing by the plum tree which, I was told, had a good yield of green plums in season.

He was enthusiastic and for a young man of twenty-four, declared something surprising, he was neat. He was a cello student and practiced long hours. Would that be a problem? I didn't think so. I liked the sound of cello, even when someone was practicing scales. The fluid, sliding, ancient-river sound was comforting.

After washing his breakfast dishes each morning, Harrison usually didn't return until evening and cooked his meal after we ate ours. He was gone Friday through Sunday. He'd mentioned his girlfriend was a flute player and I assumed he spent weekends with her.

One weeknight I invited him to join us for supper. Afterward he washed the dishes and this became a pattern during the week. I'd cook, we'd eat together, he'd clean. He made me laugh. Once, when I asked him whose piece he was studying he said, "Saint-Saens. You know, one of the famous French composers everyone loves and no one listens to."

Dan, who had just turned eleven, asked if he could watch Harrison practice cello and soon Harrison was giving him lessons. He set up the cello in the living room and I'd listen as I made lunch for the boys for the following day. "This is the body of the cello, these are the ribs, the scroll, the neck." Harrison's voice was patient. He sounded a bit like my kid brother, gentle yet commanding. "The left knee disappears behind the lower edge of the instrument." He bowed each string telling Dan the names as he did: ADGC. Then Dan bowed them.

Because he drove to class, he shovelled the driveway when it snowed. One Saturday I came downstairs and, looking out the window, saw Harrison and Dan and Seamus making a snowman on the front lawn. I was surprised to see Harrison on a Saturday. Seamus came in for a carrot to use as a nose. He was seven and this was the first snowman he'd made. I'd been remiss in the snowman department.

From time to time Harrison read picture books we had around the house to the boys but soon he began reading The Hobbit to them, the three huddled on the couch. This became a routine the boys looked forward to. When he finished, they demanded another right away.

"We can begin a new book," he said, "but only fifteen minutes each night. I need to finish what I'm reading."

"What's that?" I asked.

"The Kelavala, a Finnish book." He turned to the boys, "Which is probably why it is taking so long to finish." My children loved spending time with Harrison.

Sometimes, when the kids were in bed, and Harrison stopped practicing, he'd ask if I wanted a beer. I didn't drink during the week. Getting the boys to school and me to work was all I could manage, without throwing beer into the mix. I was a secretary at the town council office but I was also taking a course to prepare for the MCAT'S and this took all my time. My ex was a doctor and I'd become convinced over the years that I could do a better job. It was a ridiculous plan; I found math and chemistry challenging, but my ex was no genius. I thought, if I fail I fail. I didn't know, then, that it wasn't failure I had to prepare for.

I told Harrison about the incident that made me want to become a doctor. My ex had a patient in his teens who was on dialysis and had to be driven to the hospital three times a week. I knew who the guy's mother was; she worked as a secretary in my sons' school. When her son got older he insisted he drive himself. Also, he wanted to stay on his own when she went away from time to time. One weekend she was visiting her sister and agreed to leave him alone in the house. He was in his early twenties by then. As it turned out, he'd skipped his first appointment, and then became too groggy to drive when his next dialysis appointment was scheduled. He was dead by the time she returned.

It was the most upsetting thing I'd ever heard and even though I was only a distant acquaintance I went over to the mother's house as soon as I heard. She said she would never forgive herself. We talked for hours. When I got home, my husband was back from work and I told him where I'd been.

He couldn't believe I'd gone to be with her.

"How could I not go?" I asked.

"I'm glad you did," he said. "It's just that, I could never become so close to a patient."

When I first married, I believed my husband's detachment allowed him to work despite difficult odds. But the more I got to know him I realized detachment was his only suit. He wasn't much else there.

"How did you meet him?" Harrison asked. He'd poured himself a glass of wine, and one for me. Since it was Friday, I allowed myself one glass.

"I was a secretary for a doctor in Yellowknife," I said, "and he was a medical student, doing a practicum."

"Yellowknife? Were men hitting on you all the time?"

"Actually, yes," I said and laughed. He reminded me so much of my kid brother. Even Harrison's voice was like my brother's, so quiet. I often had to ask Harrison to repeat what he'd said. "There are a lot more men than women in that place. But the situation was not so simple."

Harrison didn't say anything so, after a while, I continued. Once this guy asked me out and I said no. I saw him again later that week and he said, Look, I'm away at the rigs most of the time, and I don't get a lot of time off. I just want to take you to dinner.

"That's all you want?" I asked, sceptical.

"Yes," he said, "I'll pay you to take you out."

"That's okay," I said, "You don't have to pay me. We went to a restaurant and he was true to his word."

"Some men mean what they say," Harrison said.

The following Saturday Harrison suggested we go his friend Kevin's concert in a theatre downtown. The kids would enjoy it, he said. They did. Kevin sang old hits, "Time after Time", "Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes", "Sweet Dreams," songs on my old CDs the kids and I had listened to at home, but Kevin used only his cello to accompany him. He had a looping pedal, which he'd press with his foot to add layers of melody digitally. The starkness of cello for rhythm and melody, and the unique sound of this instrument to accompany familiar songs, was mesmerizing.

On the way home Dan asked if I would buy him a cello. I told him if he was serious he should talk to his father. Renting a cello would be a good start.

A chemistry exam was coming up and I wanted to study with one of the better students in class. I asked Harrison if he would mind watching the boys Saturday night. I suggested he invite his girlfriend over.

"I'll watch the boys," he said.

I thanked him again before I left. I had on cowboy boots, black tights, and a narrow sleeveless dress, which I'd gotten at a thrift shop. It was pale grey and I wore a long brown sweater over it, which I might take off if the apartment was overheated. Chemistry was difficult for me, and I thought I could fool myself into thinking the evening was festive if I dressed like I was celebrating.

Harrison said, "You wear that to study? Or do you especially like the guy you're studying with?"

"I'm studying with a woman," I said. "I like to dress up sometimes."

"Ah, you like wearing costumes, I've noticed. And you like changing roles." He laughed.

He might be right, I thought.

When I returned later that night, Harrison and the boys were in the middle of a rousing game of monopoly. Seamus had a hotel on boardwalk. I wondered how Harrison had engineered that. Later I asked if his girlfriend had come by. He shook his head.

"I'd love to meet her," I said. Then, embarrassed, I wondered if they'd broken up.

It had been a long time since I'd cooked an elaborate meal, and I invited two couples, close friends of mine, for dinner Saturday. One couple, Phillip and Karo, had gotten jobs in another town and were moving at the end of the month, though the move wasn't far. This was a congratulatory dinner for them, of sorts. I had strawberries and rhubarb in my freezer and a recipe for strawberry rhubarb pie I wanted to try. When Harrison came home that Saturday I invited him to join us. I'd already served the boys, who were upstairs watching a movie.

At first I thought Harrison probably wouldn't want to spend the evening with a bunch of middle-aged people like us but he clearly enjoyed talking with my friends. Bernadette, Gene's wife, and Gene, who I'd known since college days, asked Harrison if he would play a piece for us. Phillip and Karo urged him to play as well so Harrison got out his cello and played Bach prelude number 1. Though it is such a familiar piece, I was stirred by how beautiful it is. It was good of him to play. He probably felt as if he were performing for his parents.

*

That night, when I went to use the washroom, he was just coming out, wearing only his pyjama bottoms. I blushed. He was so tan and fit.

When Harrison moved out, to get a place closer to town, a female student, Natasha, moved in a week later. I hadn't realized the room would be so easy to rent. Natasha was also neat but she kept to herself. The house felt strangely quiet now that there was no cello music coming from the second floor.

When I gave another dinner party and asked Natasha if she wanted to join us, she declined. Though later, when the guests had gone, she accepted the last piece of pecan pie.

*

Then Harrison called. I was surprised to hear from him. He was graduating in a few months, and was told he had a good chance of getting into the graduate program. I was happy for him. There was a brief silence. Then he asked if I'd like to go out to dinner.

At first I wasn't sure I'd heard him and when he repeated the invitation I asked, "With you and your girlfriend? To celebrate?" I felt like the older sister and I wanted to make sure I understood him.

"Of course not," he said. "You and me."

This was awkward. Harrison was 24. I was eleven years older and had two kids. Did he think I wanted to date as if I were a co-ed? I thanked him but said I wasn't able to go.

A few weeks later he came by, when the kids were still up and the boys persuaded him to read a chapter of Lord of the Rings, which I'd started with them a few weeks earlier. I felt awkward with Harrison. Was he here to ask me out again? It simply wasn't appropriate. I could not look him in the eye.

He stayed until after the boys were in bed and then suggested we go to dinner next Friday or Saturday. Could I get a sitter, he asked. I took a deep breath.

"Harrison, thank you. I am flattered by your invitation. But you are too young for me." I did not like having to say this, but I needed to make things clear. Even if there hadn't been an age disparity, I didn't trust myself. I'd already made one mistake, and it took me long enough to free myself from that one. I just wanted to stay focused on my kids and move ahead with my studies.

He did not come around after that and stopped phoning. I thought I would not see him again. But I was wrong.

Karo called to ask if I could help her pack Saturday. She and Phillip were moving the following week and friends were coming by to pitch in. The boys were spending the weekend with their father and I told her I'd be glad to help. My car was being repaired so she picked me up Saturday morning.

When we got there I was surprised to see Harrison helping along with the others. Had he become a friend of theirs as well? Apparently so.

I had on red jeans and an orange sleeveless top, both from a thrift shop. Harrison greeted me. Later he said, "I can see those colours give you energy. They energize me just looking at them." I laughed. He was right; that was why I chose them.

We'd finished packing and loading boxes into the U Haul and were drinking the last of the beer when Harrison said he'd give me a lift home. We were quiet on the drive and as he pulled into the driveway I was debating whether to ask him in for coffee. Then of course I did. This was Harrison, after all.

As I was putting biscuits on a plate, he said, "You know, you are a very rigid woman."

I do not consider myself rigid. I asked him what he meant.

"Just because you have this idea that I am too young for you, you will not even give me a chance.
And that is pretty inflexible, wouldn't you say?"

Who did he think he was, analyzing me? I left the room. But he didn't.

When I returned I asked him why he was still there.

"What are you afraid of?" he asked. "You know, if you keep going the way you're going, you'll..." He paused. Then he said, "No." He turned and mumbled, "Goodbye" as he walked out the door.

What was I afraid of? Look, one umbrella is too unsteady for two people to hold in a wind storm. Harrison might think he was interested in me now, but interest fades. I had enough to worry about without adding complications. After working my butt off for two years, would I get into medical school, much less be able to cope if I did? What I didn't want to ask, not even in the hidden chamber of the heart I assumed I still had, would I live the rest of my life on this obstacle course I set up for myself and which I found increasingly difficult to navigate. I supposed obstacle course was another way of describing being rigid, wasn't it?

When I applied to medical school a year later, I got in. I was thirty-seven. My confidence came, in part, because Harrison had faith in me.

He still does. Perhaps I should end this story before I disclose that we married the spring I got my acceptance letter. Because happiness, I'd always assumed, was a rare thing and harder to believe in than disappointment. But we did marry, and for the past twenty-three years I've been practicing medicine in the neighbouring town and he's been playing in the symphony.

When we married, I designed a wedding ring of three bands of gold – white, rose and yellow. The bands are very thin – a symbolic gesture. Thin bands break easily. I thought I'd better be prepared in case the marriage failed. But I was wrong. Failure was not what I had to prepare myself for.

*

Carole Glasser Langille is the author of four books of poetry, two collections of short stories and two picture books. Her last book, I Am What I Am Because You Are What You Are, a collection of linked stories, was nominated for the Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction.

Read Carole on why she loves short stories.

Photo credit: Min Chen.Michael Brysonhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-31780300203617543092017-06-13T21:13:00.001-04:002017-06-13T21:13:55.141-04:00Fiction #73: Alyson FortowskyStatus of Application

Caitlyn Arquette was alone in the office on Labour Day when she received an email from Laurel Kosecki. Subject: Status of Application.

Fucking Asha, Caitlyn thought. Laurel Kosecki should've gotten a no three weeks ago. Caitlyn didn't envy the recruiters their job – it was a surprise none of them was in here with her today, scrolling LinkedIn like it was a slot machine – but they all handled it better than Asha did. She let her leads build up till the surface below gave way and the pile cascaded down in a series of mini-mental health avalanches. She'd double-book herself on first interviews, beg one of the other recruiters to conduct one of them, then send the interviewee she hadn't met a follow-up email that said "It was so great getting to know you today!"

Caitlyn had only been a training manager for a month. Laurel Kosecki's had been one of the first second interviews she'd ever conducted. Pratik, the training director, had been in the room, of course. Though Laurel, judging from the year she graduated high school, was six years older than Caitlyn, she looked younger and she was thinner. Both things made Caitlyn irrationally irritated when she shook hands with Laurel, but she had talked warmly, and Caitlyn let the feeling pass. Laurel had worked in sales at a newspaper and for a website design company, business-to-business, in Saskatoon. Now she taught Business English at a community college. Several of her former colleagues worked in the Sales Department and had recommended her. But while Caitlyn had been going through the interview script, noting down Laurel's answers, Pratik had been conducting a personality test. Laurel had failed it.

"She won't fit into the culture here," he'd said.

He'd been hiring fresh-out-of-college kids, ready to mold, less likely to complain about the workload. Because she'd come recommended, they routed Laurel through the full four-hour process anyway: the first interview and written situational assessment with Asha, the second interview with Caitlyn and Pratik, and the third interview, a meet-and-greet with Nathan, the VP of Client Relations. Caitlyn privately thought she would've hired Laurel. Introverts worked well to deadlines, however well they summoned up fake kiss-ass for an interview. Besides, she'd be good at talking to the professors for textbook orders.

But it had been an unequivocal no from Pratik, and so she should have gotten an email.

Fucking Asha. Caitlyn opened the email from Laurel. One line:

Mistakes you have made

Caitlyn had somehow failed to notice that the fluorescents were emitting a hum so oppressive in the empty office that they were drowning out the Wilco album she was playing. She noticed now.

Below the line of text, an embedded .gif. The first time it cycled, she saw a paint balloon explode. The second, whiplash hair; white knuckles on the butt of a handgun. She couldn't get the message closed before she recognized that she was seeing a clip of Laurel Kosecki blowing her brains out.

*

Only once before had Caitlyn felt so certain that a moment would alter the way she lived the rest of her life. Mid-April, the year she was twenty-five. At the time she'd sworn she'd remember the date forever, but it didn't matter so much now as it had then, and she'd let it slip. Her boyfriend of ten years had rolled over in bed on a weekday morning and said,

"I have to tell you something. I slept with someone else."

The sheets had been soaked. She'd had to buy a new set every six months when they were together. He'd stained his side of the mattress a sickening, jaundiced shade. She'd had a lot of thoughts following that proclamation but the very first, the first thing she thought after he'd told her he'd cheated on her, was how gross she found it that he sweat so much in his sleep. The second was that it had been years since she'd liked the sour vinegar smell of his body.

The last time she was single, when she was fifteen, she hadn't thought of herself as shallow enough to be a girl with a type. But now, three years after her big twenties breakup, she'd vowed to never date a big man again. Tall, wide, neither. Men were bovine who weren't close to woman-sized. Large, smelly mammals, snoring and farting. Hard to believe they were the same species as someone like Laurel Kosecki, a worry line between her pale eyebrows and her long, delicate fingers. She'd been wearing a barely-there perfume or soap in the interview. Underneath it, there was no trace of her heat at all. Might as well as sprayed the scent on a cardboard sampler.

*

Caitlyn had the email closed nearly instantly. She thought about calling the police. The idea seemed unbearable in an empty office, so she didn't pick up the phone. Instead, she marked the message unread. She decided to go home for the day. Pretend she'd left without checking her emails one last time. She could "find" it in the morning and exclaim in earshot of her colleagues when she saw it. Just like that, it would be a shared responsibility instead of only hers. She turned off her music and her computer. She went to the kitchen and washed out the Tupperware that had contained her pesto salad.

*

She had forgotten her umbrella, and she got soaked crossing the street to the subway station. The turnstiles were down, so she had to wait in a line thirty people long for the agent's booth, just to flash him her pass. Every second in the station felt like a threat to her composure. Annoying, that's what Laurel Kosecki was. Annoying and selfish. Caitlyn realized she was in constant, low-level physical danger. That was life in a city. She had to be exposed, surrounded by strangers with varying claim to their territory, in order to get home to her couch where she could lie down with her cat, a pot of cranberry tea, and the mickey of gin she'd been saving in her freezer since her birthday.

*

A crowd of people on a train smelled like wet dogs when it rained, no matter how much product they'd individually applied to try and avoid it. There were three high school boys in the seats across the aisle from her. She put her earbuds in but didn't turn on her music. The stop announcements weren't working. Combined with the dim-submarine lights in the old subway cars, it gave her the feeling that she was going the wrong way or that she was dreaming.

"I'm a gofer," one of the boys said. Clean cut, with the same Ray-Ban prescription glasses that half the world wore. They all wore the same pants, a private school uniform. "I get them coffee, or vacuum their seats, or do their oil changes. Whatever is easy enough."

One of his friends asked something.

"Nah. I walked in and they just asked a few questions. I was hired on the spot."

Caitlyn thought of how much he was like her twin brother at that age, his inflection. Cory had been an outgoing kid like that, Mr. Popular. He called her every couple of months, but in his early twenties things had started to fall apart. He couldn't finish college. He could go a few months like everything was fine and then he'd hit a day where he'd wake up to his alarm, like always, and he couldn't get out of bed for a week. Caitlyn had been a bookish kid – well-liked, in retrospect, but solitary. Now she didn't read anymore. She opened novels and her eyes flicked bored over the pages like she'd forgotten how to do it. Now she was the outgoing one, preferring the company of others.

"Three things they're looking for," the gofer said. He ticked off on his fingers. "Will you not show up to work high all the time? Yes. Will you not hide out in the back room avoiding work all day? Yes. Will you show up relatively on time? Yes. That's all it takes to be fine at a job. It's surprising how many people can't get their shit together to do those three things."

*

Caitlyn's train had two stops to go till hers when she realized what should have been immediately clear, but that her shock had obscured: barring some feat of programming of which Laurel Kosecki's interview hadn't indicated she was capable, it could not possibly have been her who'd sent an email containing a record of her own death.

Thank god, Caitlyn thought, before she could stop herself. I'm not the only person on Earth who knows about this.

Someone had watched the video before Caitlyn had seen it. They had to, or it wouldn't have been sent out. Strange, how meeting someone in an interview always inspired an illusion of her as a world alone. It wasn't statistically likely that Laurel had been single, even that she lived alone. That had to be it. A partner, distraught by her death, had gone through her computer in search of any kind of reason – people who might have slighted her, or disappointed her. If she was actively looking for a job, then she'd been through more than one interview – maybe every company that had declined to hire her had gotten the same email. Maybe everyone who'd written her a snarky Facebook comment.

Maybe it wasn't Laurel who'd held Caitlyn responsible, then. Maybe she hadn't been named. Just someone grieving, someone lashing out. Perfectly understandable.

She only felt relief for a moment. Laurel could have named Caitlyn, either way. She could have left a note. Instructions for her left-behind lover. Who, in their darkest moments after the death of someone close to him, wouldn't take the temptation of complying with her orders? Of laying blame?

It could have a hoax, sent by Laurel herself – a possibility Caitlyn only dared entertain for a second before she got dangerously hopeful, then too angry at what kind of morose bitch would do something so cruel to a person who was just doing her fucking job.

*

"What stop did we just pass?" the gofer said, as if he was reading her mind.

He hadn't missed his, his friends assured him. She assumed the friends were speaking out loud here and there, watching their mouths move. Over the sound of friction on the tracks, she could only hear the gofer's voice, the loudest.

"I'm actually brain-damaged," the gofer said frankly. "I miss my stop all the time. And it sucks walking back. It's only a few blocks but everything looks so much bigger when you're walking than when you're on the train."

*

Caitlyn wondered if he actually was. He didn't talk like anything was wrong with him. A hurtful joke, if it was a joke. She guessed he wasn't old enough yet to know.

*

Alyson Fortowsky grew up in Calgary, and now writes and teaches in Toronto. She has published short stories in Qwerty, NoD and carte blanche.

Photo credit: Efehan Elbi.Michael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-56475025658644925822017-06-13T21:02:00.005-04:002017-06-14T22:14:42.985-04:00Fiction #73: Christopher ShiltsFire Built

I poured some gas onto the burning twigs. Mike made a quick sweep of the nearby trees pulling off branches and picking up those that had already fallen. He stayed close to camp, but he was hard to see through the falling snow. We already had a secured clear tarp over a rope strung between two trees where we kept Mike's pack. The sky was gray, almost black, but the whiteness of the snow brightened our little scene. I knew it was middle to late afternoon. Mike sat down next to me and asked, "How's the ankle." Snow fell steadily.

I looked at him, smiled, and said, "It hurts. I can't take off my boot."

"Can you wiggle it around?"

I lifted up my foot and tried to shake it around. I looked again at Mike. I had little mobility. And it hurt.

"I can wiggle my toes."

"You positioned okay against your pack?"

I nodded.

"Look, I can try to make a travois. Haul you out of here."

"We're good," I said. "We've got fire, food, and endless snow to melt and drink."

Mike moved back to the other side of the fire. He picked up some bigger sticks, logs almost, and put them on. He squatted and looked at the fire. The orange flames got narrow at the top and disappeared into the falling snow. The smoke rose up and leaned with the wind.

Mike finally said, "Maybe I'll just go. Take what I need to get to the ranger station."

"Rule number one, Mike. We stay put. The ranger station knows our itinerary. Panic leads to bad decisions. It won't snow forever."

He dropped his head. Then he twitched.

"Did you hear that?"

"Just wind."

"I heard a sound. A whistle."

"It's just the wind. "

"It's a whistle, man."

Then I heard it. It was indeed a whistle. We stared at each other. "We have to check it out, don't we?" Mike asked.

"I'm in no position to help. Besides, people die when they're trying to save lives."

Mike was determined to go into the thicket. I didn't think it was smart, but there was little I could do to stop him. He assured me that he'd be careful and that he'd come back.

"I've got the food and the fire, dude."

Twice while he was gone I leaned toward the pile of sticks and logs to load the fire. When he returned, he held a man around his shoulders, fireman style. There were spots of snow on Mike's knees and elbows left behind from when he must've fallen.

Mike bent at the hips and maneuvered the man over his head and onto the snow near the fire. "Can you sit up?" Mike asked the man. He did so. Mike said, 'Put your hands on my back. No, my bare back. It's okay. Pull my shirt up."

The man's hands were gloveless. His fingers were black and swollen. He fumbled with Mike's shirt. Mike took him by the wrists and brought the man's hands to his stomach. The frost bit man looked at me then to Mike and said, "You need to get me to the ranger station."

"We don't go to ranger stations. Rangers come to us. You'll die before you get there. Worse, I'll die, too. Wiseass over there"--he pointed at me--"wiseass with the broken ankle will be the only one who survives because he'll have the fire and the food."

I threw my hands up and nodded my head in agreement. Mike looked back at the man. He shivered.

"Mike, he's shivering pretty bad."

"Hypothermia?"

I reached back to the top of my pack and was able to unfasten my sleeping bag. I pulled it off and threw it toward the tarp.

"We can take turns," I said.

"All right." Mike agreed.

I leaned over and crawled under the tarp with the sleeping bag. I unstuffed it and got in it and began to undress. My pants were below my knees before I remembered that I couldn't budge my boot. I let it be. I left the rest of my clothes at the bottom of the bag. I yelled out to the man, "Listen, we're going to take your clothes off, and you're going to get in this bag with me."

Through the tarp, I could see him shake his head.

"You don't do it," Mike said, "you die. You're on my conscience now. Mike bent low and picked him up and carried him to the tarp and helped him into the sleeping bag. Once in the bag, Mike helped me with the undressing of the man. When we pulled his boots and socks off, his toes, as I had suspected, resembled his fingers. He'd lose his hands and feet. Mike zipped us both into the bag and returned to the fire. I heard him throw on another log.

I heard the man snort, then, a beginning of a cry.

"My name's Aaron," he whispered.

Mike puttered around the fire, and the fire was swollen and fantastic. He boiled water.

"I found some ground coffee in my inside coat pocket," he announced. "Coffee is the family business."

I don't remember falling asleep, but when Mike roused me, it was dark. The man still shivered, but less violently.

I dressed and crawled out of the bag, and Mike crawled in and stripped. Back by the fire, I forced myself to stay awake. The snow continued to fall, but it had slowed just a bit. I was within reach of the logs and the fire. We had two sixty-pound bags of food and supplies, we had a bright and brilliant fire, and Aaron was going to live.

My ankle would heel.

*

Christopher Shilts writes: "I am an English Teacher at the Pingry School in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. I have taught for twenty-seven years, seventeen at Pingry. I also serve as the head football coach and as an assistant track coach. I am the father of three daughters, Maddy (17), Carson (13), and Sydney (11), and one son, Joe (15). I have been married to my wife Cathy Hamm for nineteen years. I am a baseball fan first, Tigers's fan second. I wrote "Fire Built" at Kenyon College, summer of 2016."

Photo credit: Maddy Shilts.Michael Brysonhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-30077108251666453352017-06-13T20:49:00.001-04:002017-06-14T22:18:25.223-04:00Fiction #73: David GerowTaking Possession

We bought a place on Columbus Street in East York, me and my wife. Everyone said what a steal it was. The previous owner was pretty eager to sell so we just swooped in there and bam: starter home.
It was a one-storey brick house among other one-storey brick houses. Early 20th century, good walls. That's what the real estate woman said when we were on the porch – "good walls." I was trying to look all worldly so I kicked one. It didn't fall over or anything. I said, "Yep, good walls." My wife and I have laughed about that many times. What the hell do I know about walls?

The house was in a safe community, nice restaurants, good schools in case we have kids one day. Everyone drove Volkswagons and Toyotas. It was a mid-range kind of neighbourhood. We liked it.

But there was this guy across the street.

He lived alone in a little brown house, like our place but shrunken. There was a big window in his living room and two little ones upstairs, same as our place. He watched us from all of those windows.

I first noticed it in the daytime, about a week after we moved in. He was just sitting in the living room, this thin, bald, middle-aged creep on an easy chair, legs crossed, staring at us. I could see the top of a TV at the base of his window frame, but he wasn't watching it. He wanted us to think he was, but he wasn't. Whenever I looked at him he'd shift or scratch or react to something on his TV, which I doubt was even on, and when I looked away he was still. Columbus is a really narrow street, one-way with tiny lawns. The creep was near enough that I could see he had blue eyes.

I didn't mention it to Claire that day, that we were being watched. She'd have overreacted, I have no doubt. But I did suggest we hurry up and hang the curtains.

"I like the boxes and the no curtains," she said. "It feels like we're still just moving in."

She's very sweet, my wife. She thinks life is a game.

That night we got an Indian takeaway and ate it in the living room while making fun of a John Wayne movie on AMC. It was mostly Claire who was laughing. I actually don't mind John Wayne, and I was preoccupied by the house across the street.

He was there. He'd closed his living room curtains, left the downstairs light on and was sitting upstairs, in his bedroom I guess, in the dark. He sat at the back of the room, far from the window, but enough light crept upstairs from his living room that I could make him out in there, and there was always the glint on his glasses.

We went to bed around midnight. Our bedroom window also faces onto the street and also had no curtains. I made sure Claire was fully clothed when the light was on. I made sure I was, too.

#

Claire goes away sometimes for work. Not a lot, but sometimes. She's a trainee curator in a museum and they send her on various assignments. She left for Ottawa about two weeks after we'd moved in.

She'd be gone four nights.

We had curtains in every room by that time. I'd talked Claire into hanging them the day after I'd noticed the watcher. We hung them in the late afternoon; he was in his living room, pretending to watch TV. He'd been there all day. He was wearing the same thing as the day before: white shirt, red tie. That's the only thing I ever saw him wearing. I'd be surprised if he owned a second tie.

The morning Claire went away he was watching. I still hadn't told her about him. After all, he hadn't done anything except look. I was keeping a close eye on him, and I made sure Claire was home alone as little as possible, which was easy because I was on my first summer holiday as a teacher. I also added the police to the top of my phone contacts: "Aaa Police".

Right when Claire left for Ottawa, I made a phone call.

"Hello?"

"Hi," I said, "Is this Martin Feldman?"

"Yeah, this is Martin."

"This is Jeff Mason. I'm the guy who bought your old place on Columbus Street."

There was a silence. I said, "Hello?"

He asked, "Are you calling about Richard?"

"Ah, now I might be. Who's Richard?"

"The guy across the street?"

"Right, good, so you know what I'm talking about."

"Yeah, I know Richard." He paused. "Sorry."

I wasn't sure what I wanted out of Martin Feldman, but the apology was nice.

"What's his deal then?" I asked.

"I don't know. I really don't know. He just likes to watch people, I guess."

"Well, has he ever done anything else?"

"Uh, not as far as I know. I mean, I can't be sure, but he never did anything to me or my partner."

"Did he ever talk to you?" I said.

"No, never a word. He wouldn't even look at me if we saw each other outside. That was the only time he wouldn't look, really." Martin Feldman laughed.

"Is he the reason you moved?" I asked.

"Yeah. Sorry. We should have said something but, you know. It's not exactly a selling point."

"No, it's not," I said. I could have been angry but there wasn't much point. He sounded like a nice enough guy. Anyway, he'd apologized twice now.

#

That afternoon I decided to visit Richard. I'd rolled it over in my head many times and I decided it was the only thing to do. He was home, had been all day. When I came out my front door, I saw him get up and leave the living room, disappear into the back of the house, where the kitchen was in our place and probably in his, too.

I knocked on his front door and waited. He didn't answer. I tried the doorbell, which seemed to be broken, then knocked again. I knocked six or seven times before I gave up.

Back in my living room, I watched for him out the window. I was going to gesture to him when he returned to his living room. But he didn't come back. I didn't spot him again until it got dark, when I caught the glint of his glasses in an upstairs window. There were no lights on in his house.

That night Claire and I Skyped around 9:30 and I went to bed at 10. That's early for me, but I never know what to do with myself when Claire's away. I left the downstairs lights on and the curtains closed so Richard would assume I was in the living room. It was after midnight when I woke to a steady tapping. It was coming from the back door. Someone was in the backyard tapping on the door.
I came downstairs into the kitchen, a bit of light coming down from the bedroom. When I turned the kitchen light on, there was Richard's face in the backdoor window, looking in. He sort of smiled as I came toward the door. His lips were so thin.

So what was the situation? Well, I knew where the knives were. I knew that Richard was smaller and probably twenty years older than me. I had my phone in my hand and my thumb over Aaa Police. So yeah, I opened the door.

He was wearing the same white shirt, the same red tie, the same black pants as always.

"Mr. Mason," he said, still sort of smiling, and he came right into the kitchen. I left the door open even though moths were already flying in.

"Yes, hello," I said. "What do you want? It's a bit late."

"I wasn't sure until now that Claire was still out," he said.

I didn't find it worrying that he knew our names. I'd assumed somehow that he knew our names.

What I found discomfiting was the volume of all the sounds around us: the clock on the kitchen wall, the boiler switching on, the crickets outside, the moths fluttering around, the continuous roar of the highway like one of those subliminal rumbling effects in a horror movie. All these sounds seemed to own the night, and Richard seemed to own it too, while I was a guest. It was my kitchen – I'd bought it – but I wasn't in my natural habitat.

"What business is it of yours?" I asked. "What do you care if she's out or not?"

"And you went to bed with the lights on," he said. He was from the States, a Southerner, maybe from Tennessee or Mississippi or somewhere like that. "Tricky boy."

"Listen," I said, "I don't know what your deal is, Richard, but you're a creep. Okay?"

"But you," he said, taking a quick step toward me, "are much worse. You are an imposter, an invader, a plague. What do you want here? Why have you come? This is not your house. And your wife, so innocent, so beautiful, Jeff. What would happen if –"

I clocked him on top of the head with my cell phone. He stumbled, I grabbed his neck, I squeezed. I was acting on instinct – why had he come? I went through with it, his throat caving under my thumbs, me trying to push right to the spine – just give 'er! – his hands at my wrists, then dropping. I squeezed for a long time after he'd stopped struggling.

His eyes were still open. They were blue like the shallows of the sea, so vibrant that they looked like contact lenses.

#

So there was Richard on the kitchen floor. It had been bloodless, it had been silent. I think it had been necessary somehow, I don't know. But it did leave me with a corpse to dispose of. I tried to recall how movie characters had disposed of their corpses. Car trunks and deep water for the most part, like in Psycho. What about movie characters who didn't have spare cars? Off the back of a train in Double Indemnity. That wasn't likely to fly on Via Rail. Dismemberment in Rear Window. Forensics would be all over that no matter how well I scrubbed the bathtub.

Then I remembered: my house has good walls.

I went down to the basement, a colourless, cold space, purely functional, with a concrete floor. My basement has two halves – a laundry room and a boiler/storage area – divided by a wall that I suspected was hollow. That wall is about 18 inches wide. A big section of it on the boiler room side was covered over with plywood, which was held in place by a lot of little boards, screwed and nailed in at different times. I got out the toolbox, a gift from my father-in-law that we'd never once needed in our old apartment. It took about half an hour to get all those little boards off.

I slid the plywood out of the way and looked inside the wall. It ran half the length of the house, like an extremely narrow hallway. There was a soft silver tube, an air duct for the dryer maybe, running along the top. That was probably why the wall was hollow, to accommodate that air duct (or whatever it was). The important thing was that the space was wide enough to accommodate a body.
I'd push Richard as far toward the back of the house as I could, then I'd cover him with concrete. Four bags of concrete powder had come with the basement and I knew how to use them. I'd spent one awful day mixing concrete with my father when I was a child, and four bags would make more than enough to pour a thick layer over a body. There were even buckets, everything I'd need.

I stepped inside the wall with my flashlight to scope the area out. As I squeezed toward the back of the house, the floor rose. There was a hill within this wall. And shining my light on it, I saw that it was a paler grey than the rest of the floor. This mound looked exactly as I expected my mound to look.

A chisel and a hammer and I found it: a foot in a sandal. Someone was buried in there and they still had flesh on them. I stopped chiselling.

#

The wall in the basement is boarded up again now. If anyone ever squeezes in there, they'll find a mound twice the size as the one I cracked open. It took all four bags of concrete and a good six hours, not counting drying time. There's been no stench at all, and it's been months now. The investigation has come and gone. I got nothing more than a perfunctory questioning like all the other neighbours.
Claire and I now have two good anecdotes about our house. One is something we learned during the investigation: that our place was previously owned by an old lady who went missing a year before we moved in. Martin Feldman had bought it from her next of kin. Claire loves that as a spooky story, particularly when told in conjunction with the story of the man across the street, Richard Thompson, who has also gone missing. Claire loves macabre stuff. She treats it as a game.

Our other anecdote is the time I kicked the wall in front of the real estate agent. "It was so funny," Claire says. "What the hell does he know about walls?"

*

Originally from Brantford, Ontario, David Gerow studied Theatre at the University of Guelph. After graduating, he spent ten years teaching English in China, South Korea and Italy, as well as working odd jobs in Newfoundland and Nepal. He moved to Scotland in 2014 to do his Master's in Film Studies, and recently had a scene from his first play workshopped at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow. This is his first published story.

Photo credit: L.L. Nelson.

Michael Brysonhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-12013149142425861062017-06-12T20:08:00.002-04:002017-06-12T20:08:36.800-04:00TDR InterviewsInterviews since 2009:

Philip David Alexander

Heather Birrell

C.P. Boyko

Tim Conley

Matthew Firth

Zsuzsi Gartner

Douglas Glover

Daniel Griffin

Derek Hayes

Mark Anthony Jarman

Greg Kearney

Carole Glasser Langille

Adam Marek

Christian McPherson

Peter Roman

Rebecca Rosenblum

Jacob Scheier

Sarah Selecky

Carrie Snyder

J.J. Steinfeld

Matthew J. Trafford

Richard Van Camp

Ruth E. Walker

Jessica Westhead

Sarah Kathryn York

Interviews 1999-2007 are on the TDR's archived site at the National Library and Archives Canada.

Michael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-68765341336749428452017-04-09T16:01:00.001-04:002017-04-09T16:01:02.142-04:00Fiction #72New fiction! Issue #72

The Light Keeper by K.C. Toews

Leaf and Branch by William Thompson

Dugouts by Aaron Schneider

I Think I Can by James A. Conan

Submissions now open for #73

Special thanks to all who have been submitting. Enjoy. Michael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-30781702613612946742017-04-09T15:56:00.001-04:002017-04-09T15:56:23.763-04:00Fiction #72: K.C. ToewsThe Light Keeper

Jacob had never met the lighthouse keeper. He'd only heard stories. But lately, rumours had speckled Portbay Daily's headlines, and now, a poster tacked to the corkboard, next to a crisis hotline ad, made him think about the local man who lived out on Cutthroat Crags. The paper fluttered in a fan gust with the smell of feet and deep-fried pickles—distractions from his sponsor and the mumble of a red-bearded teen to his right. Bowling balls slammed onto the lanes above, and down here in the circle was the tap-tap-tap of his heel. Strands of hair floated in a beam of sunlight from the dusty basement window, the poster brightened by rays.

He squinted. Near the blue tack in the top left corner, someone had penciled a bottle. Rum, probably. Lettering on the page dipped and dove like a gannet, it's gist: solar beacons can be seen from a thirty-six-mile radius. The lights—LED bulbs with reflectors—turn off at dawn and are virtually indestructible. Our town says farewell to the lighthouse and welcomes a new, innovative system.

No more lighthouse meant no more keeper. He'd once believed the keeper saved souls of those adrift at sea. As kids, he and his sister Jen had spent nights on the beach and watched the distant light pierce storm clouds. The bulb must've been an extension of the keeper's being and, at one with the lighthouse, he'd slay the rain-razored skies. Rescue stories boomed from radio stations, deeds of a real-life hero. Then, at his grandpa's funeral, Jacob thought he'd caught a glimpse of the keeper. He'd tried to shrug through the crowd to beg him to save his grandpa, bring him back home, but the keeper's silhouette disappeared. Perhaps he'd only been an apparition. Anyway, Jen had lied—the keeper couldn't save everyone.

Now, word around Portbay painted the keeper a hermit too drunk to find his way off the inlet. Only last night, after work, Jacob's squad had joked the old man probably wanted boats to crash into the rocks so he could steal their booze, that he'd gone insane from isolation.

"Jacob, would you like to share today?" The sponsor crossed her legs, pen pressed to clipboard.

Yes.

He'd had the same dream again—the one where he and Holly escaped the island and started a new life elsewhere, on the prairies. They lived in a blue bungalow, had a horse. No longer did he see an endless grey, but an expanse of golden fields.

"Next time."

Chairs scratched the floor as everyone stood, and he swiped a handful of Walker's shortbread from the table. He counted the stairs on his way out, thirty-six, like he did each Sunday. At the top, inside the bowling alley, the deep-fried feet smell intensified. A lounge separated the eight-pin lanes from the glow-bowl ten pins. Shadows waltzed the walls from the technicolor lights, the pulse of music reverberating under his shoes. A disco ball rotated, glittered like the glasses at a bar.

"Jake!" Holly waved at him from the last lane. Her teeth shone, the gap in the front blended with the black lights.

His boss and friend Devlin guided Holly's hand, and the ball rolled towards the pins, a spare. When Jacob reached them, he scooped Holly into his arms. Dog hair clung to the violet dress she wore, and the ribbon wrapped around her head pushed back her hair to reveal wide eyes. Striking how much she looked like Jen: thin forehead, dimple in her left cheek, and blue irises that promised things would be okay.

"Did you see me, Jake?"

"Professional bowler at age six," he said.

She giggled and buried her face in his neck. Benji and Devlin joined them at the booth. Holly crawled out of Jacob's lap, and he passed the cookies to each kid. Crumbs on face, they scampered back to the lane to finish their game. Devlin slid a bottle of Pepsi across the table. His black eyebrows touched the brim of his Jays hat when he yawned, and his stomach bumped the table with his stretch.

"Thanks again," said Jacob. "Sometimes I can't tell if you're babysitting her or me."

Devlin laughed, teeth dazzling in the dark. He reached into his jacket pocket, unfolded a piece of paper, and slapped it onto the table.

"Fancy system they got."

Another solar beacon poster.

"Wonder what the keeper thinks about that."

"You'll have to ask when you see him."

"What?"

Devlin said, "Portbay can't evacuate the old man from the Crags until he signs an eviction letter. Our squad got nominated for the task."

Jacob thought of the expanse of water between town and the inlet. A curtain at the end of the lane rose, and ten white pins gleamed like straight-jacketed patients in a dark hallway. Bass palpitated over the rate of his quickened heartbeat, so loud, and a dribble of sweat ran into the corner of his lips. His foot bounced.

"No one wants to do it, the hassle and awkwardness of it all," said Devlin. "So I've decided to offer a transfer to anyone who steps up."

Jacob thought he'd heard wrong. "A transfer?"

"To the mainland. Got a connection in Morningside. Some small town in the Okanagan. They need a new deputy. All you gotta do is deliver that letter."

Morningside. Even the name sounded hopeful.

Holly laughed as Benji's ball slipped into the gutter, and his stomach churned. This morning, still groggy from sleep, he'd mistaken her laugh for Jen's, and a second later realized he'd forgotten Jen's laugh. If he moved, would he forget everything about her? His palm made its way to the six-month coin in his front jean pocket, its solidness a reminder of the order he'd created here, the support. Change meant a chance to slip, lose what he'd worked so hard to regain.

"Give it to Matt. He's got family on the mainland."

The sound of children's laughter and the hiss of the deep fryer quietened with the roar of his cowardice.

*

The two of them sat side-by-side, his legs crossed and hers over the dock's edge. An oyster-grey sky hovered above the Pacific, fog a veil over the distant mainland. Waves lapped against the wooden poles, and he tightened Holly's jacket. Brine and cedar carried through the breeze—a smell he'd always known as home, but that now turned his stomach.

"What are you going to write?" Holly tilted the Pepsi bottle.

Brown ripples sizzled atop the water, expanding twice before they vanished. On the water's ink-black surface, their reflections glistened. Hers freckled and spirited like Jen's, while his had grown sober by a deep wrinkle between his eyebrows, a face much older than thirty. He missed the spark that once shone in those eyes. Holly leaned over to rinse the bottle, erase the faces, and he gripped her shoulder.

"Jake." She swiped a loose strand of white hair from her forehead. "I won't fall."

He pulled his hand away.

"What did you write last week?" He passed her a notebook and pen.

The clean bottle sparkled, and she tapped the pen to her lip. "Secret."

A seagull cawed and glared at them from on top of an offshore buoy. With its head cocked and doll-eyes locked on his own, it screeched again. Jacob tucked his feet farther onto the dock. He wouldn't miss those scavenger birds. The mainland would have eagles and falcons—birds that soared above open fields, free birds.

"Why do they live by the sea?" Holly pointed at the gull.

"Why?"

"Cuz if they lived by the bay, they'd be bagels."

She giggled over the same joke she told every time they came to the pier and then flipped onto her stomach and drew an allium on the centre of her page, like the ones that bloomed in their backyard every April.

"I miss Mom," she said. In the silver light, tears cocooned her eyelashes.

He'd come up with answers to these statements when Holly first entered his custody, had them all ready for when her heart would shatter, but now all he could do was resort to the bullshit clichés any uncle would use, like the ones his grandpa told him when his own parents died: things will be okay, I love you, the pain passes.

In bubbled writing, Holly scribbled a message onto the page and handed it to him. He couldn't find the right words for his own—the tradition, played out—and rolled hers into the Pepsi bottle. They stood, and she clasped his hand. He threw the bottle as hard as he could and watched it glint, glimmer, and vanish into the sky. A splash echoed seconds later.

"I wonder if someone will ever read them," said Holly. "Hopefully a mermaid." Her eyes scanned the water, a faint smile on her lips.

"Holly," he said. "Remember that place I told you about? From my dream?"

"Where we could get a horse?"

"And where sunflowers grow and the night sky shines brighter than here." Jacob pointed into the distance. "What if we went to that place sooner?"

She leaned her head against his leg. "That sounds like a pretty place." Then she lifted her head and shrieked. "Jake, look!"

A monarch butterfly fluttered in front of them and landed on the dock pole. Its wings, the colour of cigarette embers, stretched taut. Veins weaved across the membrane to fade into white-speckled tips. Bulbous eyes shimmered. Holly padded over to the pole and tried to coax the creature onto her finger, but it folded its wings and flew into the sky, a kite adrift. In a second, it disappeared into the clouds. The dock slats rattled, and Jacob turned to see Devlin stride towards them, a folder under his arm, with Benji in tow on a bike. Holly teetered down the dock, the butterfly an afterthought, and Benji threw down his bike to hand her a fishing rod. Jacob had taught her how to fish last summer on the beach behind their home. Her technique was now enviable, and she cast the rod out onto the quiet water.

"Matt's a no-go. Hung over," said Devlin. He clapped a hand on Jacob's shoulder. "Keep an eye on Benji, will you? I won't be out long. A storm's supposed to roll in around six."
 Navy blue with four white stars on its portside, the small police motorboat bumped against the dock. Devlin placed the folder on the barnacle-riddled pole and reached down towards the boat cover. Jacob's grandpa had taught him and Jen how to sail before they knew how to drive. Jen had taken to it quickly, an art form, she'd said, rather than a procedure. She'd fallen in love with the way the water moved beneath her body, how you were only really in control if you believed you were.

"Here," said Devlin. "Help me with this thing."

Jacob gripped the cover, slippery from ocean dew, and tugged.

Two Aprils ago, instead of a boat cover, he'd unzipped and peeled open a body bag. He hadn't wanted Jen to go that night—the twilight sky had seemed to calm, something eerie about the way his voice drifted crisp through the air, but two lilac moons sagged under her eyes.

"I need a break, just for an hour," she said.

He watched her drive away in her yellow Jericho, boat supplies in trunk. Rap music blasted from her stereo, and she threw him a grin over her shoulder, already almost back to her old self, the exhausted young mother role momentarily forgotten. Then, as the credits of Pinocchio flickered across the TV screen, with Holly sprawled across his chest, the phone rang. Details of the next hour were still crystal: accident, body found, can you come down to the station? He hadn't been sure at first, her neck too thin, and purple veins slithered across her skin. Each finger of her upturned hands puckered from salt. Her eyes hadn't changed, though—wide and grey like his, yes, this was Jenny.

Red-and-blue lights flashed across the sand and wind rippled through the Yaupon holly bushes when he stood on the beach afterward. Midnight sky blanketed the water, and yellow tape flapped in the breeze. Avoiding his gaze, his crew gathered remains of the lacerated boat, its sail like an egg-yolk pulsing in the water. In the distance, a white light blinked. The keeper who should have saved Jen.

Someone handed him a flask, the sting replacing another.

"Holly's yours now," said Devlin, hand firm on his shoulder.

They moved into a small house on the water two weeks later, packed Jen's belongings into boxes, furniture to go with them, clothes to Salvation Army. He held onto the sweater he'd bought her for her sixteenth birthday, the one she'd worn to the Eminem concert. He knew holding on was unhealthy, but when Holly fell asleep each night, can after can silenced any thoughts of letting go. One night, Jacob found himself on the beach. He stepped into the water, waded to his chin. He could see her out there—on the horizon, her white sail.

"Jake?" The billow of waves engulfed Holly's voice. His niece stood in the sand, barefoot, head tilted. Her white hair glowed in the moonlight, and she looked like Jen, maybe she was Jen and this was all just a dream, that they were still kids chasing fantasies of the keeper, back when they swore they'd never die.

"I'm cold," Holly said.

He was, too. Damn cold.

"Hurry! Reel it in!"

Holly hopped on one foot as Benji pulled a trout onto the dock, which flipped and flopped, the hook in its mouth red.

Benji shoved the rod into Holly's hands. "You do it."

Water seeped through her dress when Holly knelt on the wood. She ran a finger along the fish's scales and turned to glance at Jacob. The first time they'd caught one together, the pike had swallowed the hook. He'd told her to grasp the creature as she would a Styrofoam cup: firm enough to hold but with enough gentleness to avoid collapse. Then he guided her finger, and they pushed down, twisted, and pulled the octopus hook free—a method to keep the fish alive.

"Maybe we should let it go," said Benji. "Hurry."

Holly returned her gaze to the trout and unhooked its lip. She held the creature over the dock where it struggled in her palm, gills aflutter. After she placed the fish into the water, she stood and stared at the surface before hauling his bike to its wheels. She pushed it towards the end of the pier where he and Devlin stood. Chains clinked, feet pattered.

"Did it swim away?" Benji said when they were near.

"Of course."

Holly snuggled against Jacob's leg, eyes shining.

"Evans, hand me that folder." Devlin placed a foot in the boat and rapped a knuckle on its metal side.

"Jake," whispered Holly.

He crouched down so they were face-to-face.

"I want to go to that place," she said.

"What place?" said Benji.

Holly pointed into the distance. "See that?"

Benji held his hands to his eyes in the shape of binoculars. "I don't see anything."

Holly wrapped both arms around Jacob's neck.

"Let me do it."

Devlin wrenched the pull start, and the engine shuddered. Skin around his neck jiggled when he turned. "What'd you say?"

Jacob straightened. "I'll go to the lighthouse. Give me that letter."

His boss looked at the water. "You sure?"

"I want the transfer."

Devlin stepped out of the boat with the help of Jacob's arm and ran a hand under his hat. His eyes scanned Jacob's face. "I'll take Holly for the afternoon," he said. "Take them to the shack for burgers."

Holly exchanged a grin with Benji.

"Get that signature and then hurry back before dark, got it?"

Jacob slipped his hand from Holly's grip and kissed her forehead. "Don't let those bagels steal your fries."

Benji hopped onto his bike, Holly on the back. He began to pedal, and she held her arms out like an airplane. Her hair rippled in the breeze, ivory against a grey sky, how good sunshine will look on her. Jacob broke his gaze and sat on the boat's bench where he gripped the tiller, knuckles white.
Devlin shoved the boat with his boot.

"Jake," he said, "you'll be okay."

Jacob swallowed, and the boat puttered away. A few metres from the dock, he peered into the depths.

A silver trout floated belly-up and bobbed to the ocean's heartbeat.

At the Crags, a deluge of mist hovered. In one hand, he cradled his cellphone and in the other, a folder that pulsed with information on the light keeper, who, he'd learned on the ride over was born seventy-two years ago. Had green eyes. Height: one hundred and eighty-three centimetres.

Rotten lingcod stenched the air, and dew-dotted rocks lined the path. Another step and a seagull, lifeless, lay on a boulder, each wing crooked. Tiny ivory bones protruded from its neck and both eyes were pecked, gone. He reached a hand to the inside pocket of his jacket to where the flask of polar ice used to nestle. Empty now, he slid both hands under his armpits and hurried his pace.

A ram-shackle cottage with shingles mangled from ocean winds emerged from the fog. Smoke billowed from its chimney towards his childhood phantom—a red lighthouse, which towered a few metres from the house. Makeshift and sodden, an elevator slouched on the lighthouse's base and shuddered with each wind gust. Rotations of the tower's light sliced through the corpus of clouds, the only weapon against the inlet's gloom. Painted scarlet, the cottage's front door loomed. Fingers of moss clung to its top corners, and the knob glinted in the pale light. The taste of copper coated his tongue as he tore at a thumbnail with his teeth. He just stood there, folder growing damp from west coast mist, trying to figure out what to say to a man whom he once thought a hero, was now a burden to his town, but whom he'd never actually met. Count back from ten to calm yourself, his sponsor once said. Ten.

Then the door squeaked, and the lighthouse keeper appeared.

Face shaven, his grey eyebrows zigzagged above oval eyes that glimmered like salmon scales in sunlight. His fingers curled around the door with nails yellowed and gnawed to the nub. He didn't stand tall, nor did he wobble on a prosthetic leg, which proved the latest headline, Lighthouse Keeper Crippled by Shark, false. The right corner of his cracked lips tugged downwards in a frown, forehead raked with wrinkles.

"Elijah Michaels?" Jacob swallowed the bead of blood he'd kept pooled in the bottom of his lip.

"If you have to ask, you shouldn't be here."

Jacob straightened his police badge. "I'm Jacob Evans, sir."

The keeper gazed at the folder under his arm, eyes narrowed to pinholes. Channels of rain fell, so loud, and a few drops seeped into Jacob's collar, down his spine, and he closed his eyes. On the mainland, there wouldn't be constant rain—he'd be able to hear his thoughts again, his breath. When he re-opened his eyes, the keeper had disappeared inside and left the door ajar. Jacob stepped into the cottage. Heat from a fireplace engulfed him. He opened his jacket, and then closed the front door, with its sleek red surface, so that the sounds of the Crags, the pounding and sloshing of water, vanished. A tabby cat perched on the loveseat, and Roger Miller's voice drifted from a stereo on top of the fridge. Paintings lined the walls, the largest behind a wood-burning stove—its canvas awash with a dark figure who stared at three sailboats in the distance.

"Evans," said Elijah. "You related to a Jennifer Evans?"

"My sister. She passed away two years ago."

Elijah shuffled to the kitchen in worn slippers and pulled out two mugs. Jacob fixed his stare on the flat, hazel hat that covered Elijah's curly hair. A single white feather poked out from the back of the hat, its edges streaked with black, its tip a brilliant blue.

"I'm sorry," said Elijah. "Can't keep up with news on this rock." He took a bottle of Old Fashioned bourbon from the fridge and poured some into each mug. Runnels of alcohol gleamed as the keeper returned to the bottle to its upright position.

"My wife took some of Jennifer's art classes a while back."

"I never knew you were married."

"I'm sure there are a lot of things you don't know about me, kid. What's the latest story? Am I a pirate yet?" Elijah gulped from the mug.

Wind rattled the cottage, and a line of bottles on the kitchen windowsill chimed. Five of them sat neck-to-neck with faded Pepsi labels. Their glass shone except for the one on the end, which was encrusted with silt and sand. Jacob stepped closer to the window. Inside each bottle lay a roll of paper.

His finger trembled when he pointed, but he kept his voice even. "Where'd you get those?"

"Washed into the inlet over the years."

When Jacob didn't respond, the keeper continued. "Don't know who wrote 'em, but I like to imagine I know the writers." A blush shaded his cheeks. "Their words have gotten me through nights I wasn't sure I'd make it. Heroes of mine, I guess."

The tabby cat brushed against Jacob's shins.

"Sounds silly," said Elijah. He moved to the window and grasped the fifth bottle. A smile crinkled his eyes into slits. "This one's my favourite." He dumped the roll into his palm and stared down.

Fragile and faded, small loopy handwriting, Jen's writing. Jacob's heart pounded, and before he could ask to read the message, Elijah slid the paper back into its bottle and placed it inside his robe pocket. He returned to the kitchen island where he held out the other mug of bourbon.

When he swallowed the wedge of cotton in his throat, Jacob shook his head. "Seven months."

"Good for you, kid." The keeper sank onto a stool. "So they thought they'd send the young one to try and twist my arm one last time, that it?"

Jacob pressed the folder onto the island. Beside a pill container, a stack of notice letters from the town council and a utility bill. Newspapers covered the shelves, dated back ten years. At the other end of the island, condensation beaded the bourbon bottle. A droplet wriggled from the cap down to the counter's surface, its trace as transparent as a spider web. He bent down to pet the cat.

"Portbay invested in a solar light system, Mr. Michaels. Costs a lot less than the lighthouse." He straightened with the cat in his arms, its purr vibrating across his chest.

"Worth a lot less, too," said Elijah. He drank from his mug.

"They have a place all set up for you in town."

The keeper waved at the walls. "Angie was a hell of a painter. She did all of these. Learned a bunch from your sister. And did you see the door? Painted that right before…" he sipped and said, "Wonder what will happen to all of them."

"I can come back to help you move."

"Saw you looking at that one." Elijah pointed to the boat painting. "You sail?

"Jen does. Did."

Fire logs crackled, flames flickering crimson. The cat wiggled out of Jacob's hold and padded across the counter. Wind echoed throughout the cottage. Jacob stared at Elijah's robe. What did Jen's message say? Maybe she'd written it the day their grandpa died, maybe her words could get him through, too. He wanted something, anything, to allow him to hang on to Jen right here and now, for even a minute.

"Come with me, kid. I want to show you something."

The keeper didn't speak as they crossed the yard. His lantern cast the hat's tail feather in an iridescent glow and turned the rain to mist, and Jacob tucked the folder inside his jacket. Ivy slithered up the lighthouse's inner walls, and he counted each damp stone step. Thirty-two. Water dripped, echoed. At the top of the lighthouse, eight sheets of glass lined the perimeter, but there was a ninth panel, empty, to his left. Devlin had been right. These repairs would cost the town. Jacob stepped closer to the gap in the glass. Silver clouds lingered above the ocean—a grey wild blend of sea and sky—once beautiful, now confinement. Even with the absent panel, he couldn't hear the waves, only the rising wind and rhythmic creak of the turning bulb. Whiteness blurred his vision each time the light flashed across his face.

Elijah inhaled deep from the climb. He set his mug on the window ledge. "Angie was taken by ALS," he said. "After her legs stopped workin' she didn't want to leave the inlet, said the water eased her mind."

Jacob picked at his frayed watchband and pulled out the eviction letter, wilted from the rain.

"You were the keeper for so many years," he said. "That won't be forgotten."

Elijah drank from his mug. "Whether keeper or sailor, that's what we do our entire lives, isn't it?" He stared at Jacob. "Search for the light."

The bulb creaked, and Jacob shifted his gaze to the bottle in Elijah's pocket. "Please," he said, "they're coming at the end of the month to shut off the electricity. You need to sign this." He placed the letter beside the mug. "I'm sorry."

"Me too, kid." Elijah set his hand atop Jacob's. He squeezed once and signed the letter. "You better get going. I'll stay up here a while."

Paper in hand, Jacob backed toward the staircase and turned. Halfway down the steps, he paused, pressed a hand to the wall. If he were about to leave Portbay, he needed to know what her message said, a final piece to cling to, surely the keeper would understand. It only took him a few moments to return to the top of the lighthouse.

Empty.

Jacob concentrated on each breath, his gaze steady on the mug of bourbon. Ten. The open window panel yawned. Nine, eight. He moved to the gap in the glass and peered down, his stomach leaping into his throat.

Seven.

Below, a feather lay on the boulders. Its blue tip sparkled, and each lap of wave nudged it closer to the tide line. A sand-crusted bottle bobbed against the rocks, floated like a miniature sailboat. Jacob stumbled from the panel and pushed both palms to the window ledge. Black spots dotted his vision. He looked back at the bourbon.

Six.

Five.

Four.

Then he blinked, tore his stare from the mug and looked outward. Three. Across the rocks, over the ocean, over the loss—his, Elijah's—the mist broke and cast the horizon in a fiery shimmer, the mainland a pale form in the distance, and he felt a fragment of hope as fleeting as the glimpse of a butterfly. For a second, he knew they'd escape. But he knew, too, in an instant coastal clouds would encompass the sky again because when he closed his eyes there were flashes: parents he'd never met, rows of cars at both funerals, Holly in front of her mother's tombstone with a rose in hand, and a silver trout floating wide-eyed on the water.

Two.

He traced the mug's rim with his index finger and lifted it to his lips. One.

The white light circled round and around.

*

Kara Toews is a third year student at the University of Alberta where she focuses on English and Creative Writing. Along with her studies, she is busy working on her first novel and exploring the beautiful city of Edmonton. Toews loves to travel and often latches on to the small details she stumbles upon during her adventures. She strives to inspire readers with her words, and she draws inspiration from snow-filled afternoons, hikes beneath forest evergreens, and from copious amounts of coffee.

Michael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-18900150190560076292017-04-09T15:44:00.001-04:002017-04-09T15:44:44.059-04:00Fiction #72: William ThompsonLeaf and Branch

When she was fourteen, my daughter became a tree. She didn't just turn overnight—suddenly appearing, like the Christmas tree we set up in the living room every year. She turned slowly, beginning with her skin.

My wife and I were in the kitchen one Saturday morning in March, the table spread with newspapers and the accoutrements of coffee. We heard a shriek from the downstairs bathroom. I beat my wife to the stairs and thundered down, my heart left somewhere in the kitchen. I stopped in front of the bathroom door, caught between needing to know what was happening and not wanting to burst in upon my daughter half-dressed. My wife pushed her way into the bathroom.

I waited at the foot of the stairs, sitting hunched on the bottom step and staring gloomily at the pattern of lint on the hall carpet. Sounds of voices came to me from the bathroom—crying and lamenting from my daughter, steady reassurance from my wife. What on Earth was going on?

Finally, my wife emerged from the bathroom. I stared a question.

"It's all right," said my wife. "Just girl trouble."

"Jesus," I thought.

 ***

The skin on my daughter's back went first, turning ridged and woody, and quickly becoming bark-like overnight. She didn't want me to see her skin, but it was impossible to hide her hair and eyebrows as they changed colour—from auburn to green. After a week, delicate leaves were curling over her head. She refused to go to school, and she barely touched her phone.

She grew taller, sprouting up and straightening out. Her arms and legs grew thin, and her fingers and toes rooty and long. She had the look of a young mountain ash, I thought. I said this to my wife.

"Roan," said my wife, (pedantically, I thought).

"Roan, then," I said.

"God you look weird," said Danny, her younger brother, who had paused in the doorway, skateboard in hand.

"I think she looks beautiful," said my wife.

We were gathered in the living room. My daughter stood tall in the centre of the room. She spread her arms, silvery-grey, lifting them towards the ceiling, nearly touching it. "I want to be outside," she said.

"We are going to have to tell your grandparents," murmured my wife. "Maybe if I sent them a picture, they would understand better."

My daughter's face had grown smooth and papery, and, well, wooden; it had slimmed down, growing more elongated. Her expression remained fixed much of the time, but her eyes didn't change—bright and blue and curious.

"They won't understand," she said.

"Perhaps not," said my wife, patiently, "not right away, but they'll get used to the idea. And anyway," my wife added brightly, "you make a striking tree."

 ***

It's now passed the middle of September. My daughter says less these days. Her foliage has grown spectacular with the advance of autumn—green paling to a delicate yellow, flecked with red. I always talk to her when I'm in the yard. She plants herself here and there, moving from one spot to another, depending on her mood, and I carefully mow around her if she roots herself in the middle of the yard. I don't always see her at first, but I usually hear her, softly singing or rustling her leaves, even if the wind isn't blowing. And sometimes I'll come outside to find my wife standing beneath her branches, embracing the slender trunk and murmuring, one cheek pressed to the smooth bark.

My wife is better at this than me.

"Don't worry so much," she says to me. "It's going to be fine."

So I try not to worry. My daughter is getting sleepier as the year turns. But I have a sad feeling when I think about her out there in the yard, especially if I wake in the night. The bedroom window is always open, even if the nights are cold. I lie and listen, my wife beside me, still as a stone. Tears prickle my eyes as I think of my daughter maybe going away forever. One day, I'll come outside, and she might be simply gone, or she might plant herself permanently, withdrawing forever into a reaching stillness I only partly understand.

But for now, I talk to her, and I make sure she gets the best water—a special compost tea I make with a recipe I found on the Internet. And she seems happy enough—swaying and bending as she grows more and more accustomed to her new form. As long as she's happy—that's what I tell myself
I keep an eye on my son these days, though, as he crashes around the house and sometimes falls into moody silences. He's just twelve. They say girls mature quicker than boys, but who can tell.

*

William Thompson teaches children's literature for MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta. He is totally blind, and does all of his work electronically. He maintains a webpage at www.OfOtherWorlds.ca, and has two collections of short stories—The Paper Man and Other Stories, and Fractured and Other Fairy Tales—both available on Amazon.

He has published nonfiction with Hippocampus Magazine, and his short fiction has appeared in The Penmen Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and The Flash Fiction Press. He considers coffee a food group, and he loves to walk and read, usually at the same time.

Michael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-18935821138414202412017-04-09T15:39:00.000-04:002017-04-09T15:39:07.815-04:00Fiction #72: Aaron SchneiderDugouts

When Margaret told him, Jonathan remembered the dugouts. Their smell. The mud that pinched your skin when it dried. The must of decaying leaves. He didn't know why he remembered them. It didn't make sense, but then nothing made sense.

"They were girls," she said, "young girls."

It was Thursday afternoon, and he had a sudden feeling of vertigo, as if everything had shifted down and sideways and then come to rest. If he took a step, he would miss his footing.

Margaret told him how she had found the pictures on Rob's computer. She hadn't been snooping, she said, although it wouldn't have mattered if she had been. Rob had moved out two months ago. She needed the contracts from the last two quarters for the accountant—Rob ran a small plumbing and electrical company called Rob's Pipe and Socket. Jonathan pictured the logo: Rob in capital letters over an x made by a pipe wrench and a lightning bolt.

"His desktop was a mess," Margaret said. "You know how he is."

"Yes."

"I was just opening folders at random." She described clicking on Work2 and then Documents and then Clients and then New Folder and then New Folder again. "I don't know why. I thought he might have forgotten to name it. It was full of JPEGs. You can see the thumbnails before you open the files. They..."

Her words were spare, exact, hedged against pain, against the hysteria that throbbed in her precision. He could tell that she had rehearsed them, repeated them to herself in an empty room until they became real and true, until she made them into testimony. She had cut them down to just enough, no more than needed to be said, and part of that just enough were the details: The names of the folders. The girls. Some of them were clothed. A few partially. A handful not at all. She noticed that a lot of them wore their hair in braids. She counted 319 pictures in total. These were facts, these were solid, a substance that had weight, that had heft that he felt as she passed them to him one by one.

"I thought you should know," she said.

"Thank you," he said.

"Someone needs to tell your parents," she said, "before the police..."

"Yes," he said

"Thank you," he said again.

When he hung up, he was surprised that his first response wasn't disbelief, only that sudden unbalancing, that reorientation that left him drifting through the rooms of the house, hovering, unmoored, until he touched down in the dirt and leaves of the dugouts.

*

They were Jamie Sterling's idea. Jamie was one of a handful of kids, Andrew Lucas, Brent Carson, Mickey Holm, and the Berrick brothers, whose houses, like Jonathon and Rob's, backed onto the ravines. In Owen Sound, a ridge runs along the west side of the sound, parallel to the water, and they all lived on top of it, on the edges of a rough semi-circle that ancient streams had carved into the slope. Where the sunny expanse of their backyards stopped, and their green lawns ended in a weedy fringe and a curtain of leaves, the land fell away into shade and a closed off stillness, and Jonathan followed it: Trees grew there. They had long trunks. Tall and smooth. And branches that started too high up to reach. Jordan, the middle Berrick brother, could shimmy up the skinny ones, but Jonathan's parents said he was half monkey. The tall trees with long trunks blocked the sunlight and the sound of the town, creating a separate space, a columned silence set apart from the streets and cul de sacs around it.

The boys could walk easily along of the tops of the ridges between the ravines, and in their muddy bottoms, but they had to grab onto trees or roots to climb the slopes and dig their hands and heels into the dirt to control their descents. They loved the fearful, whooping exhilaration of sliding down an almost vertical incline greased with damp leaves, skidding their feet ahead of their half-falling bodies, and making a hard, satisfying landing in the dirt. They did it one summer until they wore tracks in the slopes and ground mud permanently into the seats of their pants. It was how Mickey Holm broke his leg. He caught a foot on a root, flipped over head first, cartwheeled and folded it awkwardly under him. He tried to stand up and couldn't. They had to get his father. He slung Mickey over his shoulders, held him on with one hand, and used the other to pull himself up the slope to their backyard. No one told them that they had to be more careful, less reckless, but they knew, and they were, warning each other with serious voices, for a little while.

Unless they brought them to settle a dispute, or dragged them by the hand to show them what they had built, or, frantic, racing ahead, led them right to where Mickey was lying and trying not to cry, no grownups went there, not even to walk their dogs. The ravines belonged to the boys. They played hide and seek, king of the hill and war in them. They competed to see who could jump over the widest parts of the stream that ran through the deepest ravine, gathered in small pools, and slipped away, quick and silent and clear, before winding through a spongy meadow that was half marsh, and disappearing into a storm sewer. One time, Andrew Lucas missed a jump and sank up to his armpits in the shoal of mud under the bank in the meadow. When they pulled him out, he was covered in black muck that stank of rot. His mother made him strip down to his underwear on the lawn and sprayed him off with the hose before she let him in the house. The cold water pulled his skin tight over his ribs. He squealed and ran in circles like it was a game, and she yelled at him to knock it off, and he did, but they could tell that she was only pretending to be mad. Later that summer, they pushed an old log across the stream and used it as a bridge.

Sometimes, they would crawl up the slopes and spy on their own houses from the shelter of the trees. They watched their mothers, their sisters sunbathing, their fathers mowing their lawns, as single people when they thought they were alone. They looked disarmed, different than the boys were used to, a little like strangers, and the boys felt like they were doing something illicit, dangerous. Jonathan remembers spying on his father. He was reading a magazine on the back deck. He turned the pages and let a hand dangle and swing. He traced loose, distracted patterns on the planks with his fingertips. He seemed smaller somehow. It was hot. Sweat spread in patches from his armpits, darkened a line where his gut folded into his rib cage. Jonathon watched him for half an hour, luxuriating in the difficult prickling sensation of something like guilt, before sliding back into the cool silence of the ravine.

Sometimes, they created elaborate fantasies, mixing together their favorite TV shows, movies and books, mapping an imagined geography, Castle Grey Skull, Tatooine, and Minas Tirith, over the real one. But most of the time, they built forts. When they were younger, these were simple structures, sticks leaned against trees, low loose walls made of rocks and mounded dirt, screens of dead branches stabbed into the ground. When they got older, they borrowed their fathers' tools and built platforms where the trunks were close together.

Jamie Sterling always took the lead. He was bad in school, and every year his teachers debated holding him back, but he loved to make things, and he was good at it. He took out books from the public library, old Scouts manuals with plans for lean-tos and tree houses in them, and big, hardcover books about castles and fortifications with two-page, full color illustrations. He always had the best ideas. He showed them what a Quinsy was, and they built one one winter. They used it as a hideout until a pair of warm days caved in the roof. He would go into the ravines alone to work on their latest fort, and he would stay after they got bored and wandered off or went home. He liked to see things finished.

When Jamie was twelve, he got into Vietnam. Before that, he had been into the middle ages, and he had made swords and plywood shields and tried to build a catapult. Before that, it was Voltron, and he still had the full set of robots that fit together to make the super robot Voltron in his room. They all got into Vietnam. They watched Platoon, and talked about Charlie and Hueys, and debated whether M16s were better than AK47s. But Jamie took it further than the rest of them. He recorded episodes of Tour of Duty, the TV show based on Platoon, and re-watched them on the combination TV/VCR his grandparents gave him for Christmas. He bought the Platoon video game, and played it so much that he could repeat the route through the jungle level, "down, left, down, right, up...," from memory. He got the idea for the dugouts from the second episode of Tour of Duty, the one in which the squad discovers a tunnel complex under a Vietnamese village. The tunnel rats they send in find bedrooms, offices, storerooms, armories, even a mess hall, a whole, second, invisible village carved out of the earth.

When Andrew Lucas and Jonathon found him, he had already drawn out a tunnel and a round room with his shovel on the floor of the driest ravine, and started to dig. They got their own shovels and helped him. They were getting too old for forts. They were at that stage when they were trying to escape childhood by rejecting things they used to love, but this felt different than the wood platforms or the Quinsy, it felt bigger, more permanent, more serious, and the work was harder. They dug down at least four feet, until the sides came to their shoulders, and, in Calum Berrick's case, to his eyebrows. They hacked through roots and levered free rocks. Their hands blistered. Their backs hurt in a pleasant, reassuring way, and they periodically straightened up and stretched like they had seen their fathers stretch when doing yard work. In a few days, they had a trench leading to a round hole the size of a family tent. They made a roof by laying down logs and thick branches, and then cedar boughs, marsh grass and plastic they scrounged from Brent Carson's garage. They piled the dirt they had dug out on top of this, and covered it with dead leaves for camouflage. When they were done, it was a low, symmetrical mound in the ravine floor that was wider at one end. It didn't look like much, but they climbed into the opening at the end of the tunnel and it was close and dark and real. They had to crouch and grope their way forward. The sides brushed their shoulders. And then it opened into the room.

There was enough space for all of them to sit in a circle. They dug seats out of the walls and covered them with garbage bags. Jamie opened a smoke hole in the roof and built a fire pit out of stones in the middle of the room. Even he knew better than to start a real fire so close to the beams of the roof, so he stuck candles on the stones. The flames half-lit their faces when they leaned forward, and filled their contours with shadows. Just being in the dugout felt private, conspiratorial, like they were doing something wrong, and getting away with it.

It was the last fort they built together. Jamie kept working on it, regularly at first, and then fitfully, when the mood took him, well into his teens, building more tunnels and smaller rooms, repairing the sections of roof that collapsed over the winters. The rest of them stopped helping him. But they didn't stop coming. It was the one place they could count on being alone.

Calum and Jamie stole porno mags from the bottom of the stacks in their fathers' closets and hid them in a hole in the wall. The boys took them out and passed them around. They inspected the pictures. They talked about sex. They talked about blowjobs. Do they actually blow? Calum said they did. He blew on his hand, changing the intensity of his breath and the shape of his mouth. He looked focused and a bit confused, like he was trying to solve a difficult problem. He was a literalist. He liked building models with tiny pieces that he needed tweezers for and that took days to glue together. His room was filled with replicas of battleships and famous buildings that his mother yelled at them not to touch. Calum stopped passing the magazine. He turned it one way and then the other. He was looking at a picture of a woman getting fucked from behind. The man and the woman were both standing up and the woman was facing the camera. The boys could see the man's head over her shoulder, and his hands grabbing her hips and breasts—"tits" they liked to say. Her legs were spread, showing her shaved genitals, and Calum was looking at them closely. "There must be a hole for it to come out of once it goes in," he said. They argued about this. Jonathan, whose parents had given him an elaborate talk and a copy of The Joy of Sex, said it wasn't possible. But the boys wouldn't listen to him. They didn't want clear, sanitized facts. They wanted the magnetic experience of revulsion, not lessons, and Calum was adamant. He swore he could see the penis coming back out. Standing in the kitchen, staring out across the deck into the backyard (how long has he been standing here staring like this?), Jonathan feels again the atmosphere of confusion and arousal, the discomfort of hiding the erection that rubbed against his jeans, and the frustration that they wouldn't listen. He hears Calum saying "look" like he is pointing to a map.

They drank beer they paid older teenagers to buy for them. They smoked pot they bought themselves, plugging the hole in the roof to keep the smoke from getting out. Jonathan's childhood memories of the ravines are precise and clear. His teenage memories are blurred, smudged by substances, a restless anxiety, too-loud voices, shoving that was starting to move past play into the edgy toughness of boys trying to be men.

*

What Jonathan thinks about now is Rob. Not Rob the way their parents knew him, not Rob who needed glasses to read, who was good at board games, and who was three years younger than Jonathan and needed to be protected from him. He thinks of Rob the way he was with other kids, away from adults, in the intimate spaces of childhood. Rob as himself in the ravines.

He was a part of a group of younger brothers, Jordan and Mark Berrick, Steven Lucas, and Will Holm, who formed a smaller, looser knit analogue to Jonathan's circle of friends. They tagged along in ones and twos, whining to be included. Sometimes they were. More often, they weren't, and, when they weren't, they hung around out of reach and complained. It wasn't fair, they said. The older kids didn't own it. They weren't the boss. Sometimes they formed a small gang and staged raids on the ravines, creeping down from a backyard, breaking things, knocking over forts, scattering and running like mad when the older boys went after them. Some days, these raids would evolve into games of war with bases, sides and battle lines.

Rob was always at the head of the younger kids. He complained the loudest, the most fiercely, refusing to accept the rules of childhood, their unfairness. He organized the raids. He convinced his friends to stake out a portion of ridge as their own and defend it. He didn't like to run. He wanted to stand up for himself, to fight, and he often did. He couldn't win, and he never won, but that didn't stop him. He was short for his age and pudgy, one of those kids whose bellies are a hard, round curve, and whose arms and legs look too short for their frames. He turned red and wild when he got angry. His freckles stood out like bruises, and he forgot that he was small and fat.

Jonathan remembers: They were having a fight with clods of dirt. The summer had dried the stream to a trickle and baked the exposed mud until it cracked into fist sized squares. They gathered these by the armload and carried them back to their bases. They were like snowballs, but harder, heavier in the hand, bursting into puffs of dust on impact, and more satisfying. At first, they threw them at each others' feet, yelling "Grenade!," imagining the dust was smoke, but then Mickey hit Jordan Berrick in the face. He said it was an accident, but no one believed him, and the fight got serious. They started throwing them hard, to hurt, and right at each other.

When Jonathan hit Rob, Rob was looking over the top of a ridge. Jonathan could see Rob's head and shoulders. He crouched behind a tree. He waited until Rob turned, and then nailed him right on the top of the head. He shouldn't have done it, and he knew that. Even in the middle of the fight, they were aiming at each others' bodies, avoiding their heads and faces. But he did it anyway. He can't remember why, but he remembers that it was a perfect shot, from sixty feet away at least, long and arching and precise. He remembers the feel of it leaving his hand and watching the high, breathless flight.

Rob never saw who threw it. His head jerked from the impact. The dried mud exploded in a spray of grit. And he went stiff with rage.

He got so angry that he broke a shard of glass out of an old window that someone had tossed into the ravines. It was the length of his forearm, curved and wickedly sharp along the edges, like a knife an exotic bad guy uses in a movie, the kind he pulls with a sadistic flourish on Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger in the climatic fight scene.

He chased the older boys, swinging the shard in wide, clumsy arcs. He was going to get them. He was going to fucking kill them.

They scattered, laughing, scrambling out of the way and taunting him. They yelled "Spaz!" They jumped and winced with real terror when he got too close. It was a game, a good one because it was cut with fear as sharp as the glass.

Mickey threw the first clod. Rob was going after Jamie, and Mickey hit him right in the small of the back as hard as he could. Rob seized like he'd been shocked, and whipped around, but Mickey was already darting away. The rest of them joined in, forming a loose circle around Rob, throwing when his back was turned, and then dodging and running. They wouldn't have done it normally. It wasn't fair. The six of them against Rob. Hitting when his back was turned. But the shard suspended the usual rules. And his wild rage. And the thrill of throwing and hitting. And of pushing him further.

Rob was wearing a blue baseball jersey and black track pants. The dried mud left light brown marks where it landed. Jonathan hears the projectiles striking flesh. The hardsoft thud. The bruising sound. The dust stuck to Rob's face and bled down his cheeks.

Rob lunged and tripped. He caught himself with his free hand, holding the glass up, and rushed again. His face was streaked and purple. He started making a hard, high keening noise, an animal noise, the wrenched howl of frustration and fury that would not fit into words, and that collapsed into gasps before starting again.

Jonathan can see him: flailing, hysterical, overcome by and impotent with rage.

Rob stumbled, tried to right himself, but couldn't because he was holding the shard like a glass of water, and went down. It hit a rock and shattered.

They pounced on him.

They pinned his arms and legs and started to talk about what to do with him, how to punish him for being a little shit, how to teach him a lesson. Mickey wanted to beat his ass. Jamie was already trying to give him an Indian burn. Calum took charge. He said one punch in the arm from each of them was fair. Mickey argued for two, but Calum said one. There was a sense that things had already gone too far, and the rest of them agreed.

They held him down and took turns. Rob fought them the whole time. Jonathan remembers: the feel of holding him, the hot, solid flesh of his right arm, and the ease with which they held him. Jonathan relaxed, let Rob flex and struggle, gave him room to fight, maybe hope, and then clamped down. There was the frisson of shame and the vicious, detached joy of strength and then it was his turn.

None of them worried about Rob telling, not even Jonathan, not when they were holding and hitting him or when they let him up and he ran home. They did things there that they weren't supposed to, that they wouldn't do elsewhere, beyond the shade of the trees, beyond the high, steep slopes, and the stillness that closed out the world, and no one told. Rob wouldn't tell. And he didn't tell. That was the understanding. That was what made the ravines special. No one ever told.

*

Jonathan and Rob were never close. There was the age gap (3 years), but that was the smallest of the differences that divided them. Jonathan liked books and Rob liked sports. Rob played basketball on the driveway in the summer and in rec leagues in the winter. Jonathan did well in school and Rob struggled. They both liked video games, and they played them together, but always against each other, in long sessions, arguing about whose turn it was, who cheated to get a high score, or who got to play which Street Fighter character (both of them wanted Blanka because of his Beast Roll), and who won mattered.

In high school, Rob started skateboarding and smoking pot. He lost a lot of weight, and wore baggy clothes that showed off how thin he was. The pot gave him a hard, wet cough. He started dealing drugs, mostly pot and hash, to his friends, and then, according to him, more seriously. When Jonathan came back from university, they would climb down into the ravines and smoke Rob's pot. Rob had a good spot, a couple of logs around a fire pit next to the dugouts. Jamie had stopped repairing them years ago and the dugouts had collapsed into holes filled with leaves, rotting branches and plastic. There was a place under one of the beams and a decaying tarp where Rob hid his stash so that their parents wouldn't find it if they searched his room. He kept it in an old tackle box, filling the lure compartments with neat, saran wrapped bundles of bud.

Rob knew everyone now, and he liked to talk about the people he knew, people in Owen Sound who Jonathan had never heard of and who all had nicknames—Dirty, Sketchy Steve, Tripper. He talked tough and knowledgeable. He called Jonathan "Bud." Jonathan heard his own voice get rougher, his sentences get shorter, fill up with monosyllables.

When he graduated from high school, Rob started a general contracting course at Georgian College in Owen Sound. He did it because their parents said he had to do something. He dropped out in November. That spring, he hitch hiked out west. He made it as far as Banff and then doubled back to Calgary when he couldn't find anywhere to stay. Then Edmonton. For a couple of years, he lived in a house with half-a-dozen other burnouts and sold drugs to the oil workers down from Fort Mac. Then he smartened up and got his shit together. He started framing houses in the suburbs going up around the city. He got new roommates and the names of his friends changed. Then his electrician's ticket at The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. His apprenticeship. The frustration of working for other people. Then Margaret. Rob's Pipe and Socket. A house in a suburb he had helped to build. The kids. The frustration of other people working for him.

At first, Rob came back a few times a year, staying in his old room until it felt like he'd never left, and then only at Christmas, and, once he had the kids, for a week every second year. Sometimes Jonathan saw him. Sometimes they missed each other. Mostly they talked on the phone. Like the visits, the calls got less frequent, more abbreviated and perfunctory. The truth was that Jonathan didn't know Rob, what he was doing, what he was making of himself and his life any more. Not really. Not in the ways that mattered. And he knew that he didn't. But he still imagined Rob going on like he had since childhood, changing in a predictable pattern, following an obvious trajectory, fitting more closely the less he heard from him into who Jonathan thought he was.

*

Margaret is right. He has to tell his parents.

Resting his hands on the counter, Jonathan remembers a headline from the day before: "Woman Charged After Striking and Killing Dog." The details of the story have stayed with him: A middle aged woman hit a man walking his dog. It happened at stop sign at a suburban intersection. She waved them across and then ran them down. The man got out of the way, but the dog didn't.

Jonathan can see her behind the wheel. She raises her hand. The gesture is curt, polite but brisk, as if she is in a hurry. And then the car jumps, accelerates into the suspended moment of disbelief: It is happening and the man doesn't yet know it is happening. He can't let himself. And then he is starting to understand, but too slowly, because these things don't happen. Not here. Not to him.

Jonathan can see her, but he can't see her face, and, like the man, he doesn't understand. He doesn't understand why she did it any more than he understands why he threw the clod. He can't touch that moment before its long and hanging flight. Or maybe he can: Sometimes you want to hurt someone. Sometimes you hurt them.

*

Aaron Schneider is a Senior Literary Editor at The Rusty Toque. His stories have appeared in The Danforth Review, Filling Station, and The Puritan. His story "Cara's Men (As Told to You in Confidence)" was nominated for the Journey Prize by The Danforth Review.

Michael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-16235198426995287992017-04-09T15:28:00.002-04:002017-04-09T15:28:49.663-04:00Fiction #72: James A. ConanI Think I Can

The office was designed to be warm and inviting. Calming colours, soothing landscape paintings, and gentle lights. Shelves of academic books and framed diplomas adorned the walls, all to assure anyone who walked in that they'd be well looked after. None of it helped.

Dan had been nearly certain before he'd arrived that coming was a mistake, but the look on her face made it that much worse. "You are the last sort of person I'd ever expect to see in this office," said Dr. Katherine Parker.

"That's a hell of a thing for a therapist to say to a patient," he answered, surprised at the hurt from his voice. He was tougher than that.

"Prospective patient," she said. "I gave you the appointment because Dr. Markham, another patient, told me you needed help and, frankly, that you weren't half as full of crap as your public persona made you seem."

Dan couldn't help but smile. "That's Will looking out for me."

"I'm surprised you wouldn't try and turn things around yourself. That's what you're always telling people to do in your books. And seminars. And corporate retreats."

It was true. Dan was a motivational speaker. He had been for years. Dan the Man McCann's I Know I Can Program and its two sequels had sold three-quarters of a million print copies throughout the English speaking world, and nearly half that again in audiobook form. People often told him he was inspiring. He had believed it, until recently.

"My wife left me. She took my son with her."

He watched her hostility visibly drop a notch. It was unprofessional, if understandable in this case, for a woman in her position to feel enmity toward someone on her couch. She viewed him as a hack, a cheap trick leading people astray from her purer, more scientific methods. "I'm sorry," she said, with some contrition. "What happened?"

It was been a typical quiet night in Riverdale, the pretty, tree-lined neighbourhood of Toronto where Dan and Madison had lived for seven years. They put Alex, their five-year-old, to bed then Dan poured another drink from the bottle of Wild Turkey he kept in the kitchen drawer. The single malt visibly displayed in the dining room was for when company came, the Dirty Bird for his every day consumption. He sipped as he stared out the living room window at neighbourhood children throwing a Frisbee around in the park across the street. He basked in the rays of the evening sun, sloshed the ice around in his glass, and reflected that life was pretty good. Famous last words.

Madison had seemed distant, he'd realized afterwards, for almost two months, since his last speaking tour through the eastern US. They had been arguing more and more about the little things. It had been too late to do anything about it by the time he clued in as to why.

"So I decided the next book is going to be about Alex," he said as he flopped down across from her, in the living room.

Her brow furrowed. "What?"

"Yeah. I gotta write what I know. The first book was about helping people get the job they want. Wrote it before I met you, when I first started working for George. The second was about—"

"Finding the perfect life with the perfect partner," she said. She'd heard that phrase a thousand times at his seminars, when she'd come to be seen by his clients—living proof that he'd followed his own prescription. Her voice was hollow as she said it.

He pretended not to notice. Instead, he raised his glass, toasting her. "Right. And then, settling down and building a happy home."

She drummed her fingers on the arm of the couch, across the room, no longer pretending to read the book in her lap. He was oblivious to her anger, half in the bag.

"So now book four, how to raise a kid. I mean, Alex is pretty perfect, we've done an amazing job, he's bright, he's cute, put the three of us on the cover together and it'll make us a—"

The book came sailing across the room, catching him square on the nose and knocking his drink from his hand. On its way to the floor the bourbon spilled straight down onto the crotch of his Dockers. The glass shattered on the hardwood, inches from the book.

He was too bewildered to react at first, just sitting there watching tears form in her eyes. After the longest minute of his life she stood. "How dare you!"

The best he could manage was, "What?"

"Eight years we've been married. I've done everything for you. Went to your stupid seminars, posed for your book covers, pretended we were this perfect couple so people would buy what you were selling. And it got us this."

She waved her arms around her, gesturing at the interior of the expensive house in the nice neighbourhood that his success had helped buy them. Dan wished she'd been crazy, wildly hysterical. It would have made her seem unreasonable. It would have made her seem like the bad guy. Instead she was calm. Calm and angry and very sad.

He got up from the couch, still so confused as to where this was coming from but not wanting her to look down on him."Maddy, babe—"

"Don't you goddamn dare 'babe' me. I gave up my career to be here and raise your son and be a goddamn stay-at-home spokesmom for Dan the Man." She said the name with a hate that threw him back a step. "And I was okay with it. I figured it would be a few years until Alex was in school full time, then I could work and you'd go on to something else and it would all be fine." She put her hands to her temples, balling her fists, her eyes closed. "I am such a fucking idiot."

He raised his arm, index finger pointed, trying to seem authoritative, to think of something to say that would put it all right and restore the his, normal world of three minutes ago. Instead, his hand went limp and fell to his side. "I don't understand."

"I know you don't!" she practically spat at him. "You and George and Reid and those other pricks you work with. So busy wrapped up in your own bullshit telling people how to live their lives that you don't realize how full of it you all are. Blind goddamn hypocrites, all of you."

Then he started to get mad. "Those are my friends you're talking about. They're good guys and they have nothing to do with this." The latter half of that statement was true, he reflected. The former, not so much.

"You're half right," she sighed. "This is about you, not them. They're all dicks, but they stay wrapped up in their own little worlds and write and work and don't screw up their loved one's lives." He knew she was wrong about that, but saying so wouldn't help, so he kept his mouth shut. "You have me and Alex. You brought us into this. You lie to everyone who reads you and listens to you and you lie to yourself."

He was even more confused. "Maddy, hon, I know I take some liberties and the way I describe us is a little hyperbolic, but we've talked about that. It's just to sell the damn books. It's for us. I'm not perfect, and sure, I'm not here all the time, but I'm here when it matters."

"That's the problem Dan. You spend so much time away from home selling people on your perfect family and perfect life and telling them they can have the same thing." Her arms were crossed, tears running freely down her cheeks. "But you aren't here often enough to know, not really. When my mom died you were off on tour a week later. When Alex had to get his tonsils out he was scared to go in for the surgery, he kept asking for you, but you were away at some rented campsite up north teaching assholes at some investment firm the value of positive reinforcement and team building." Her voice was strained, cracking.

Reason was beginning to cut through the bourbon fog in his brain. "Everything I do is to provide for the two of you. I'm not the man I pretend to be, I know it, but I'm not as far gone as that. I love you both."

"Do you," she sobbed, "or do you love the perfect wife and son you want us to be, the ones you write about? I was fine with it when it was just me. I was! I could live with it. It didn't bother me because I thought you saw our son for the beautiful boy he is, not some prop in the Dan McCann show." Now she was getting hysterical. In eight years of marriage he'd never seen her this angry. "I won't let you use him. I won't let his selfish, idiot dad's stupid job screw up the rest of his life!" she yelled.

He was at a loss for words. He'd always considered himself a smart guy. People paid good money to listen to him talk, after all. Would they do that for a stupid person? The irony didn't escape him that it was Madison, his professed reason for speaking to these people who thought him smart, that now struck him dumb.

For a moment they stood there in silence as he gaped at her, unable to speak. Her arms were still crossed over her chest, her body turned away. Then she said the words he was dreading, "Get out."

"Maddy, I—"

"Get out Dan. You can get your stuff some other time, when Alex is at school or at a friend's or something. Anything. Just get out!"

And to his shame, he did. Dan the Man McCann, who always knew what everyone should do, how to fix any personal problem with the power of self-knowledge, just walked out. He grabbed his wallet and his car keys and headed for the door, hardly able to believe that his life had taken such a complete one-eighty in the span of three minutes. The Madison he'd married was gone, and instead this woman, full of what had to be a long-suppressed rage, stood silent in the centre of their living room, refusing to look at him.

As soon as he was out the door he made for his Jag. Old Brown Eyes, he called her. Vintage. His favourite toy. He scratched around the keyhole in the door, damaging the paint, but was too distracted to notice.

When he tried to back out of the driveway, he turned too sharply and ran straight into a pole. He realized what he'd done to Old Brown Eyes. Inside the house he'd been too stunned to feel anger. Now, the damage to his car brought it all to the surface. He beat at the steering wheel with his forearms, wrists, and balled fists, swearing as he went.

"Fuck shit goddamn bitch cunt kick me out of my own fucking house and wreck my fucking car!" and so on.

He wasn't sure if this went on for a minute or an hour, but when he looked up Madison was there staring at him through the open doorway. She was holding Alex. The perfect little blond-haired boy-child he called son. Alex had obviously been woken by the commotion. He wouldn't understand the situation; he'd only know that bad things were happening. Madison was still glaring at him as she closed the door. This seemed to Dan the final and most horrible injustice: that his son should suffer, uncomprehending, and should then have to wait to have his hurt tended to, because Madison was still in a rage. All I wanted, he thought, was to write a book about how much I loved our kid. It got me kicked out.

He heaved a great sigh and slouched over the steering wheel. Picking himself up after a moment, he realized his nose was still dripping blood and that his crotch reeked of cheap bourbon. Come to think of it, I've had a few drinks and driving, he looked in the rear view at his smashed bumper wrapped around the pole, probably isn't the best idea. He got out of the car.

The sun was almost down, but the tranquil park-side scene had been shattered along with Old Brown Eyes' rear window. Any neighbours or children in the park who hadn't heard Madison yelling had surely seen a certain half-drunk and bleeding motivational speaker get into his car and fail spectacularly at driving off into the sunset. There were more than a dozen pairs of eyes on him. Friends and neighbours and kids who would be gossiping about him the second he was out of their sight and, no doubt, for some time afterwards.

He started walking north, towards the main street—he could get a cab there. Get a cab and go ... somewhere.

 "So I grabbed a cab and headed for the Four Seasons in Yorkville." Said Dan, when he'd finished his recollection.

"Didn't they turn that into condos three years ago?"

He shrugged. "Well I know that now. I'm staying with Will."

"And have you had any contact with your wife since this happened?"

"It's been a week. I've tried. She keeps shutting me out. Not being able to see Alex is the worst part." He paused in thought. "Not being able to work is a close second."

"I don't follow you." Said Dr. Parker.

"She took everything from me. Everything I based my career on was a lie. I can't help my clients get what they want when I've just lost everything I've ever worked for. George is going to kill me."

"I see" said Dr. Parker. "Your wife, she mentioned this George as well as someone else, Reid. Another colleague?"

"Yeah. Reid Palowski. Goes by Reid Righteous."

That got her attention. "The Positivity Guru down in Los Angeles? You two work together?"

"That's him. And yeah, we do, sort of. George recruited both of us to the agency, but we tour and speak separately. We're friends though. When he's not in the hospital that is. Poor guy's got more suicide attempts under his belt than anyone else in the self-help business. Trust me, that's saying something."

Katherine wasn't sure how to process that, and decided to leave it be for now. "Are there any other motivational speakers working for this George?"

"Jeremiah St. James down in the Bible belt, and Ben Burst based in Miami."

She shook her head. "An evangelist and a pick-up artist. I suppose George sets you up and sends you touring wherever he thinks you'll bring in the most money?"

"Pretty much."

"Tell me about George."

*

They had met at the Queen's Head in Cambridge. It had been a bad day for Dan. He was getting kicked out of Harvard. His scholarship had been revoked and he'd decided to enjoy the campus pub one more time.

There had been an incident the week before. The Crimson had just won; Dan and his friends had been in high spirits. They'd gotten shithouse drunk, stolen a bench from Riverbend Park, doused it in cheap vodka, and given it a Viking funeral by floating it down the Charles to the strains of "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard." The police had been called.

When Dan had been let out of the drunk tank the next morning he'd discovered a voicemail summoning him to a disciplinary hearing. In the space of a week he'd been expelled, lost his student visa and, along with it, the hopes of a doctorate in psychology from the Ivy League. He'd be going home to Canada a broke failure. He still had his bachelor's, but with the note on his expulsion affixed to his transcript he doubted he'd be able to get admitted to anywhere but the most backwater college.

He thought of his future, the career he'd planned out. Maybe I'll be able to open a practice in a strip mall in Scarborough. It turned his stomach. He cheered himself up by picturing Lucy van Pelt from the Peanuts comic strips. Other kids growing up on his street tried to open lemonade stands. He'd imitated Lucy and put up a sign reading "Psychiatric Help, 5 cents." His parents had laughed, but it had been the start of something.

He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he barely noticed when the old man sat down beside him.

"Double gin and tonic. And a Red Bull."

The order was odd enough that it caught Dan's attention. The bartender, flummoxed, began pouring gin into a highball glass. "We don't serve energy drinks."

The old man frowned. In profile, Dan thought, he looked like a silver-haired Clark Gable. "Then tell me where I can get some decent cocaine around here."

The man noted the surprised looks on the faces of Dan and the bartender. "No?" he snorted. "What good are either of you then?"

There were no other patrons at that hour. The bartender backed away and turned towards a shelf, pretending to wipe and straighten glasses. The old man looked to Dan. "These places are all the same—no good drugs and people look at you like you've gone nuts if you try to have a little fun." He downed half his drink in one long pull. "George Hamilton." He held out his hand. Dan took it with a raised eyebrow. "Not that one," said George.

"Dan McCann." The old man had an iron grip that Dan did his best to reciprocate.

"Great name son. Your daddy must've been a sharp one. Why the long face?"

"I could ask you the same."

"Back in forty-eight, or maybe it was fifty-eight, I don't remember, I had my dissertation rejected by the Faculty of Psychology. They told me phrenology was dead. What do they know? Anyway, whenever I'm back in town for business I like to go take a long, reeking piss on William James Hall. Security interrupted me midstream this time so I ran in here. Figured I'd refill the tank and head back when the coast was clear. How about you?"

"I just got expelled." Dan filled George in on the whole sordid incident, sensing a kindred spirit in the old loon.

"Ha. I like you, kiddo. You got spunk. Too much of the ol' joie de vivre for this place. Don't let it get you down. Anyway, you said you were on your way to a master's?"

"And then a doctorate. I had the grades to keep going. Now I just have a big steaming pile of debt, no prospects, and a one way ticket back to Toronto."

The old man tweaked the corner of his silver moustache with his thumb and index finger. "Canada huh? Untapped market if ever there was one. Practically the wild frontier when I was your age. But there's people up there and I suppose they'll buy my snake oil just as quick as they do down here. And you could cover the Northeast. What the hell. You seem clever, kid, and you got a name that says you were born to sell shit. I'm setting up a little business venture right now. How'd you like a job?"

"We met five minutes ago," said Dan, at the same time asking himself why he was objecting. He didn't know what George did, but his suit and his Rolex said that he did it successfully, and anything was better than going home empty-handed. The older man gestured to the still-alarmed bartender, who refilled their empty glasses and retreated to the storage room.

"Doesn't matter," said George. "I got a good feeling about you, just like when I met a young J. Edgar Hoover for the first time. You've got a whiff of destiny about you." George sniffed the air. "Or maybe just bourbon."

"Never could drink American beer."

"Me neither. Not since the war."

"Which one?"

"Can't remember."

"Well," said Dan, downing his drink, "I suppose I'd better ask what you do."

"Human Resources Management Solutions. Efficiency Consultations. Personal Enrichment Advisement. Corporate Team Building Seminars. Intellectual Capital Maximization. That's one of my favourites."

"Come again?"?

"Motivational speaking, my boy. Easiest job in the world if you have half a brain in your head and the confidence God gave a third-rate politician. Nothing to it. Just work the buzzwords in. Say 'dynamic' a lot."

"Oh," said Dan, his heart sinking.

"C'mon now, no need to look so glum. You'll start as my assistant. I'll show you the ropes, and before long you'll be writing books, selling out hotels and convention centres, and having corporate bigwigs pay you to tell their employees how to be more like you." George sipped his drink and cleared his throat. "Or you'll be a total failure and I'll fire you. Honestly, I don't know. But I need an assistant to get myself back on my feet now that I have investors. If the psych department here hates you, you can't be all bad. Whaddya say?"

"Why would anyone want to be like me?"

"You got a degree from Harvard, on scholarship. You told me so."

Dan nodded. "A bachelor's. On a partial scholarship," he admitted.

"Whatever. We can sell you as a self-made success story. Once you take the job as my assistant—no, my junior partner—and help me make some money, that is. Daniel McCann, entrepreneurial pioneer in the field of Intellectual Capital Maximization. Dynamic young go-getter." He laughed. "See, it's just that easy."

"How could it possibly be that easy?"

George sighed contentedly and smiled. "Because this is America, sonny, and Americans are never satisfied. This is one of the best places on Earth to live. People die by the boatful just trying to get here to work. But it's never enough; we always gotta have the bigger house, the nicer car, the hotter wife, and make more money than our neighbours. You get the idea. Tell people they can have that stuff if they do what you say and they'll believe it because they want to believe it. It's been that way as long as I've been around."

The old man's words rang true. "How old are you anyway?" Dan asked.

George smiled. "Immortal, for all intents and purposes. I was in Egypt with Carter when he found Tut's tomb. The old wise men in Cairo said the same curse that killed Lord Carnarvon gave me his life force." The old man's eyes grew manic, and he made a fist in front of his face as he pronounced the last part, which Dan found unsettling.

"And you've been doing this awhile?"

"Sure have."

"So why are you trying to start a new business now?"

"Did a little spell in St. Claire's."

Dan was apprehensive all over again. "The insane asylum?"

"The very same. Five years. My old business partners at Speakers United had me committed. Said I was a liability. Then they took all my best ideas and moved on without me. Look, I'll be honest with you son, I forget things. I'm a head case, a curmudgeon, and an on-again/off-again drug addict for the past sixty years or so, but I know what I'm doing. What's more I just conned a whole bunch of old ladies in Beacon Hill out of their dead husbands' money to fund this little venture, so you may as well come along."

It wasn't that Dan didn't have reservations. He had enough reservations to fill every seat in every restaurant in Boston. But he couldn't shake himself free of George's magnetism. The man's sheer force of personality was overwhelming. Dan wanted that for himself. After all, here was a man who, though undoubtedly crazy, had clearly been through things much worse than being expelled from Harvard. He couldn't have been as old as he claimed, but he was at least in his seventies, and still full of the stuff of life, determined, and eager to take the world by the throat. The job offer had its allure. It was too good to be true.

"So is this the part where you say you just need some money from me to make this all happen?" said Dan. "A few thousand maybe? Or whatever I've got on me?"

"You think I'm a con man?"

"You just said you were."

"The Beacon Hill set? Please. They got a fair exchange for their filthy lucre." He thrust his pelvis towards the bar, winked, and gave Dan a knowing look. The younger man struggled to keep his lunch down. "No, the only thing you need to do if you want this job is meet me in New York in two weeks or so. My card."

He handed Dan a crisp, white business card. It read George Ulysses Hamilton Esq. CEO, Real Unlimited, with a Manhattan address and phone number.

"You a lawyer?" asked Dan.

"Did a law degree at Dartmouth after I left this dump. Never passed the bar though."

"Real Unlimited?"

George shrugged. "We'll just be calling it 'The Agency' most of the time."

"It doesn't say what we do."

"Doesn't have to. Unlimited says we have boundless potential, and so does anyone who hires us. Real says we're bona fide. That's all people need to know. Now, you going to take the job or what?"

Dan spent a long moment making up his mind. It was rather sudden, and more than a little suspect. But, he reasoned, he could always back out later if it went south. And, being honest with himself about his situation, if he didn't find something to do soon he was going to have to move back in with his parents when he got home to Toronto. That clinched it. "I'm in."

"Glad to hear it. Welcome to the team." The two men shook hands again, leaning against the bar, grinning at each other. "Your first official act as my assistant will be to memorize that phone number and swallow that business card. Then, help me deal with this mess."

George pointed out the pub's front window. In the street was campus security, accompanied by two cop cruisers. "They've tracked me down. Bartender's nowhere to be seen. Probably finked on me."

Dan blinked in confusion. "Why did they call the cops if all you did was piss on the psych building? They could have just written you up like they do with all the drunken freshmen."

George's eyes darted from side to side, and he reached into his tan overcoat. "I may have introduced them to Matilda here." He produced a revolver. "Play along, kiddo. I know how to get out of here unseen, but you'll have to buy me some time."

Before Dan could argue with this ludicrous new demand being made of him, four uniformed police officers walked through the door. In one swift movement, George spun around behind Dan, grabbed him by the throat with one hand, and put the revolver's muzzle to his temple with the other. "You pig's get any closer and I'll blow the kid's brains out!"

The four cops froze. "Get back! Away!" George yelled, extending his gun arm and putting two rounds into the wall above the door frame for good measure. They retreated back outside amidst shouts of "Jesus Christ!"

"The old kook's got a hostage!"

"Call tactical!"

Once the police left the bar George had relaxed his grip. Dan fell to the floor, his ears ringing and his crotch somewhat damper than he'd have liked.

"You alright, son?"

"No" was all Dan could manage.

"Well you better get used to it. Rule one of working for me: There will on certain occasions be shooting involved. Long as you don't rat me out I can promise you'll always be on the right side of it."

"'Kay," said Dan, still dazed.

"Rule two: We never drink in a place without a back door."

Dan, still on the floor, thought about it for a second. "I don't think you'd need rule two if you got rid of rule one."

"I make the rules, kid, not you," said George. "Now, I'm going to scoot before SWAT shows up. When they question you, we never met before. You know my name is George, the bartender probably told them that, but nothing else. Right?"

"Right."

"Good. Sorry about this next part. Have to make it look real."

"What?" was all Dan had time to say, before the butt of George's revolver struck his head and he was out cold.

"So his name is George Hamilton?"

"Yeah."

"But he looks like Clark Gable?"

"That's your takeaway from all this?"

Dr. Parker shuffled the pages of note paper on her lap. It was a gesture she affected when preparing to state the obvious.

"Assuming everything you've just said is true--"

"I'm afraid so." He said.

"Then tabling the rest of George's behaviour for a moment, my takeaway is that you took a job you thought was morally questionable from a man who recognized your desperation and used it to abuse and manipulated you."

Dan thought that over. "Most of my corporate clients do the same."

She had her rebuttal ready. "And that's what ended them up in your program in the first place. Or, like you, on my couch. You made a decision to act amorally for financial gain, and based your entire life off of the perceived rewards. Now the facade's broken and you're in therapy."

"So what do I do?" He asked, starting to panic.
She adjusted the rims of her glasses. "Try telling the truth. Start with yourself. Then your wife. Then maybe your clients."

He scoffed. "I've seen your fees. If I start being honest with them I'll never be able to afford to be honest with you."

Tucking her notes into her desk drawer, she smiled, seeing dollar signs. The two of them had that much in common. "Then it's my professional opinion that too much honesty isn't always the best thing. Start small. We wouldn't want to overwhelm you. Not when we have so much ground left to cover."

*

James A. Conan is a Toronto based writer. He studied Politics and International Development at Trent University before coming to the conclusion that Liberal Arts degrees are for chumps. Since then he's been a retail clerk, landscaper, auctioneer, staffer for a major provincial political party, and general jack of all trades to make ends meet. He currently works as a Line Cook at Eulalie's Corner Store in Toronto. He is the author of one unpublished novel and several short stories, published and pending publication. He is also an Editorial Assistant at Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, an online speculative fiction magazine.Michael Brysonhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-79646837396578347312017-01-24T21:55:00.003-05:002017-01-24T21:55:53.367-05:00Fiction #71New fiction! Issue #71

Full Submission by Michelle Boone

For Janette, With Love And Fluff And Little Squalor by Joe Davies

Behind the Scenes by Tim Conley

House Fire by Sarah Roebuck

Ribbons by Leanne Simpson

The Fire by Sandra Maxson

Submissions now open for #72

Special thanks to all who have been submitting. Enjoy. Michael Brysonhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-51663255667746232402017-01-24T21:47:00.000-05:002017-01-24T21:47:42.426-05:00Fiction #71: Michelle BooneFull Submission

Grace was first to notice the raccoons on the neighbour's roof.

"Look. They're playing." She poked Marty in the ribs, causing him to spill his magic margarita. Everyone at the barbecue was drinking them. The Marketing Director of Best Body Foods, Nathaniel Hall, was mixing. He boasted a secret ingredient, which he challenged his staff to guess. Grace figured it was a jolt of hot sauce to balance out the sweetness of the mango. She had deduced this on her first sip, but was allowing an acceptable time lapse before going public.

"Not playing, fucking. At least, the poor guy's trying to fuck her. But she won't keep still."

Oh. Great. Had she really just pointed out two raccoons copulating? To Marty. Everyone knew he'd been trying to bed her for the last seven months, ever since she'd been promoted to marketing rep for coffee. Why had she encouraged him?

Kim and Douglas came closer sensing some titillating gossip. Now the four of them huddled together watching the smaller raccoon turn her head back to bite the larger male, who was trying to mount her from behind.

Grace had chosen this spot on the upper deck, away from the bulk of Nathaniel's guests, hoping to find some tranquility. Most partygoers were gathered on the lower deck where sirloin burgers and tofu patties were being flipped on a barbecue built into a brick island that was surrounded by posh outdoor furniture adorned with bejeweled cushions. Also on the lower level was a large jacuzzi tub that could comfortably sit twelve. Around it, stood the most intoxicated of her colleagues, daring each other to take the plunge.

She'd snuck up to the second floor and out onto this sundeck through a sliding door in the master bedroom. But Marty had a way of sniffing her out no matter what. She was lucky if she had a full minute to herself before she felt him sneak up behind her. She held her breath as his familiar stink, an overripe need, reached her nostrils. Perhaps it was her own scent, the lingering fragrance of apathy, which he'd recognized and pursued. Before long, other interlopers had spilled onto the top deck so that her illusion of solitude was completely spoiled.

"Aw, come on, Rosie. Let Rocky in." Marty laughed hysterically, leaning into Douglas' side.

"Yeah, a fella's gotta use it or he'll lose it," Douglas said.

The female raccoon was inching her way slowly across the neighbour's roof, the earnest male in hot pursuit. It was a desperate dance in which he grabbed her hind quarters and thrust forcefully until she eventually maneuvered around to bite his neck. Her growling and biting continued until he loosened his grip, at which point, she squirmed free, and scurried forward a few inches. Then the whole process began again.

"Yeah. Rocky must be getting real sore by now." Marty patted his crotch, looking at Grace with a pained expression as if to garner some sympathy.

"Isn't it obvious? Rosie's saying, No." Grace had an overwhelming urge to stuff one of the mangoes she'd seen on the kitchen counter into Marty's fat mouth. Except she knew he would conveniently mistake this as flirtation, saying something like, "You're so sexy when you feed me mangoes."

"Rosie's not in the mood, right Kim? Headache, I bet," said Douglas, elbowing Kim.

Kim didn't smile. Grace recognized in Kim's refusal to smile her grim determination to ignore what she couldn't control.

"Come on — surely you know — it's a physical necessity for Rocky. For males every —"

Grace did not hear the rest of what Marty said because she couldn't breathe. She hunched over, reaching her hand to the brick wall for support. Not a physical necessity, she thought, more like a sense of entitlement.

"Are you alright?" Kim asked.

When she was able to, Grace stood up straight, took a deep breath. "I'm fine," she said, waving away Kim's concern. "It's this heat."

Everyone was staring at her. Marty took a gulp of his cocktail. Douglas glanced down at his sandals.

Kim straightened her dress. Grace looked back at the neighbour's roof where Rosie appeared to have given up biting Rocky. He was pumping at her rear end in five second intervals.

Full submission.

Grace understood Rosie's sense of defeat. She remembered her despair when, years earlier, Duane had pulled the car onto an abandoned road; how a cold fist had seized her heart and squeezed. How her heartbeat thudded in her ears as he maneuvered the Plymouth slowly around giant rocks and potholes, broken branches discarded by the wind. When he finally turned off the ignition and looked at her, she didn't have to ask why. The answer was written plainly on his face. In that instant, as she became cognizant of what he truly was, she made a decision. She would not resist. Because he wanted her to fight, she would lie as limp as a wet rag.

Laughter erupted loudly in Grace's ear. More coworkers had gathered to gawk and point at the performance taking place on the roof. Two marketing reps had taken on the voices of the male and female raccoon.

"Why can't I come?" said the rep for breakfast beverages.

"I told you to stop drinking that powdered crap." The rep for desserts spoke from behind a recliner as if his invisibility made his impersonation of Rosie more convincing.

"I want you so badly."

"You know, they really oughta repair this roof."

"Do you like it doggy style?"

"Will you just come already?"

Grace had wanted Duane to come too. As soon as he pressed into her, her body stiffened. She tried to make her muscles go slack, tried to feel the power she told herself she held over him by not struggling. But it was difficult to feel powerful when she was so dry, afraid that his greedy cock would break her in half.

"Hey, I think they're finally done," Douglas said, looking up at the raccoons, who, during the course of their intercourse, had travelled all the way to the other side of the roof.

"What do think? Thirty minutes." Marty said he planned on notifying the Guinness Book of Records.

"Not that thirty minutes would be a big deal for me" he said, eyeing Grace hungrily. "But I'm sure it's a record for small mammals."

Thoroughly spent, Rocky rested his snout on Rosie's back. Her head sagged down to the roof tiles. Yes, it was exhausting to let oneself be walked all over, Grace thought.

Duane had finished with a long anguished sob. Afterward, he fumbled to pull up his jeans, lit a smoke. She took a long time to move. It was a fight just to expand her chest to draw breath into her lungs. The smoke from his cigarette drifted into the space between them, concealing his face in a fog that disappeared once he cracked open his window. He drove her home not saying a word, like nothing had happened.

The upper deck had grown quiet now that the raccoons had finally shifted apart with most people wandering away to seek refreshments below. Grace excused herself to use the restroom. She rummaged through her satchel, her hands trembling as she opened the bottle. She slipped a single yellow Zoloft under her tongue. In the vintage ornate mirror she stared at herself, watched her eyes flicker as the tablet dissolved and mixed with her saliva. She waited for the beautiful chemical burst.

There was a soft but persistent knock at the door.

She waited for the pill to kick in, to feel herself float away, before stepping out of the bathroom to reassure Marty that everything was fine.

*

Michelle Boone divides her time between Toronto and Sedona, where she is writing a novel about surviving the Big One. "Full Submission" is her first literary publication. A former Montessori teacher and graduate of a Ph.D. in the Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Department at the University of Toronto, she has several academic publications.
Michael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-14265125053902915672017-01-24T21:38:00.002-05:002017-01-24T21:38:53.995-05:00Fiction #71: Joe DaviesFor Janette, With Love And Fluff And Little Squalor

… [I]n small, hopelessly sincere handwriting, were the words, "Dear God, life is hell." Nothing led up to or away from it.

 —J.D. Salinger
From where I stand it's as if I can see a set of steps descending before me. Down they go, one at a time, while I perch, conceptually, somewhere near the imagined top, each step waiting to lower me into decrepitude of one sort or another. I am fifty and have yet to really feel my age. So far little has failed me, though the other day I broke a tooth and the barest edge of the illusion began to fray, and clichéd though they are, those steps appeared.

This happened after the meeting with Janette, the one where she said, "Write a piece intended to appeal to the widest possible audience." Actually, she wrote those very words on the back of the piece we were discussing at writers' group and handed it to me. "That's your assignment," she said, "Even though you never do anything I say," which is not entirely true, though often true enough.

Quite possibly I'm the last person who should ever attempt to describe the stories I write. To say that I often undermine the purpose of what popular fiction aspires to is one way to think of it, but I'm equally comfortable with my hazy attempts to bypass the conventions of its "higher" forms as well. Why? Oh God, I don't know. Perhaps because I was told I shouldn't.

If rejection slips were money, I'd be rich.

What would that story look like, the one I'm not writing? And what is "the widest possible audience"? What do they want? Romance? Do they want to be titillated? Do you show them people trying and failing and trying again and succeeding? Is that the formula? Give them an underdog, someone to care about? Someone who's basically good but flawed and succeeds despite it? And do all the words have to be ones any grade 9 graduate could understand?

I can't. Not deliberately. And I can't tell you why I can't. But there seem to be principles involved.

What have we got so far then?

Nothing.

We have a laboured suggestion of metafiction with the author tapping out his dreary claim to be standing at the top of some sorry set of steps. That's about it. Not even funny. Squalor? There's little of that. No vomiting in trash cans, no allusion to anyone losing his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s. Just the idea that sooner or later it's all downhill from here. Or to overstate the case: "Dear God, life is hell."
Too melancholy? It's a pretty word, but a sentiment best avoided.

So, to escape that, here's a very short unfathomable story in which there is no melancholy, no plot and even less sense, a story that might be about reaching fifty and doing just fine, or perhaps it's just words in search of a story, a mere suggestion:

*

The landing craft, just one of many in this unnumbered wave, approaches the beach. The crowd huddled in its hull are a happy lot, drinking tea and coffee, eating fruit salad and Queen Elizabeth cake and banana bread covered with thick pats of butter.

The beach ahead is still a ways off. Some look at it with binoculars, others claim to see it unaided, and still others can't be bothered about the beach, since it too, like everything else in this story is merely wishing it represented something, and in fact, more people are looking back, trying to come to terms with the ups and downs and shortcomings of the crossing so far.

And so it is. An invasion of fools, or rather, an indiscriminate gathering and the fools just happen to outnumber everyone else by a wide margin.

One leans towards another and says: "Were you born old?"

The look back is one of pleasant confusion, the question repeated: "Were you born old?"

"No. I don't think so."

"Me neither. Don't tell anyone, but I like it this way."

The landing, when they eventually find the beach, goes swimmingly. All get wet. All get sand in their shoes. Everyone winds up in the crosshairs of someone else, but it's to be expected. Such endeavours are not without risk.

The ensuing procession through Europe—or wherever this is—is diverted here and there by various stops at trellis-shaded cafes and quaint village inns with holy books in bed-side tables written in languages no one speaks any longer. Not really. And in this way, an agreeable number of misunderstandings are avoided. And everyone sleeps well.

Everyone. Or so the fantasy goes.

A few puzzled souls stay up late to take a second glass of wine, perhaps a third, perhaps some brandy or a little schnapps. The air is cooling, the sun has long set. Dew falls on the small, cloistered gardens. Questions get asked. Always more questions, but that's fine. Just knowing there are questions is a great comfort, a balm for those with doubts, especially when the questions are understood, the reasons for asking in the first place, acknowledged.

A plate of biscuits appears, some bowls of dried fruit, a round of cheese on a worn cutting board.

At one point, to illustrate one thing or another, somebody laughs and recounts a brief but very old vignette of two men, hunched over with age. One of the men cries out when a willow branch suddenly begins to grow from his shoulder. The other asks, "Do you mind?" The first says, "No. We came here to watch life pass and life has caught up with me. Why should I mind?"

It's not clear if there's anything to be garnered from this, but everyone nods and smiles all the same as if there must be something to it.

A Corporal arrives. He steps into their midst, wearing dusty olive drab and looks as if he has probably spent the day behind the wheel of a jeep. He has a letter from his girl, back stateside, his girl Loretta. "She says the darnedest things," he says, "The darnedest things" and scratches his head. His presence is neither welcome nor unwelcome. He has merely arrived to accentuate the contrast between those who are touched by events and those who are not.

What events? Why, any event louder than a whisper. Any event worth more than two nickels and a dime.

"Well," says the corporal, beginning to back away, "I just wanted to bring you your mail." And he leaves a stack of envelopes and packages on the table nearest him, adding that there's a dance going on a little ways down the hill, in case anyone's interested. "No?" he says, no one having stirred at his mentioning it. "Then I'll cut a rug for you."

And he leaves. And he leaves. And he leaves.

Non sequitur, non sequitur, non sequitur.

The envelopes are handed round. One package is opened. The stamps are first admired. They are beautiful, as are all the various markings showing how the package has been redirected over the years. Inside is a broken watch and—since it is not only possible to write it but also to imagine it—a long and dwindling list of people who's hearts were moved and how and why.

Oh, such indulgence! Whatever for?

God so help me, I do not know. Respect perhaps. Curiosity. Since over at the edge of things, off in a corner, there's movement, and a certain Sergeant, until now unnoticed and half-asleep, says, "I miss anything important?"

"Ah," says a voice, affable, authorial. "Well… no. Not really. Just a bit of fluff. And people growing old."

As if rehearsed, someone stands and takes the broken watch to the Sergeant, saying, "This came for you. Like always."

The Sergeant nods, or something like it, and he too grows old. He takes the watch and looks off into the warm night, and in his way, when seen in a certain light, is almost dignified, while I… I lower whatever defenses I had. I surrender and mumble my apologies to Esme.

*

Where to from here? Well, we could open our eyes and watch the wind bring down branches or we could stand by the skid-marks where the car went into the river. Random personal details, obscure, I know.

Or… Quite on my own, I could go to the dentist and get my tooth fixed and watch as the steps mist over again for a spell, hiding them for later. Something like that. Not forgetting this began with losing the corner of a tooth. And not shedding a tear either. Even if time has played freely with what I once thought so solid.

*

Joe Davies' short fiction has appeared in Queen's Quarterly, The New Quarterly, The Manchester Review, The Missouri Review, Rampike, eFiction India, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Descant, PRISM International, Grain Magazine and previously in The Danforth Review. He lives in Peterborough, Ontario.

The photo credit is to John Climenhage.

Michael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-61358723766182480412017-01-24T21:26:00.001-05:002017-01-24T21:26:41.146-05:00Fiction #71: Tim ConleyBehind the Scenes

 Kowai mono mitasa.
 – Japanese proverb

Just before the salads came she noticed that he had something up his nose. The left nostril (his left), something solid. She leaned a little closer while he was telling her about how he had gone to university to study sports management but to appease his father he took a minor in business and that decision turned out to get him the job at the bank. She tried to lean in such a way that might suggest attentiveness rather than anything more, eating her salad and trying to get a better look at the thing up his nose. It was solid and, she thought, inorganic. She was fairly certain it hadn't been there earlier. Now he was talking about salads, because he could see that she was enjoying her salad, and didn't she think that salads were always great when someone else made them for you, but only when someone else made them? She nodded but he pressed on: did she know what the best thing about working in the bank was? (She remembered how Chiyo insisted on paying for their coffees as she admitted, well, he works in a bank, and Kiwa repeated, he works in a bank, and Chiyo tried to laugh it off, saying, it's a job, that has to count for something, and Kiwa said, counting is the operative word.) No, she really did not know what the best thing about working in a bank was. It gives you, he said, excitedly trying to figure out how to end his sentence, it gives you a look behind the scenes.

When he was telling her that he had taken over his father's investment portfolio and really made something of it, Kiwa determined that the object was metallic, a greyish blue. And when he was telling her that even his uncle, who had, as a matter of fact, always dismissed his nephew as a fool, had now not only recanted but repeatedly asked him for some financial advice, she thought that she could see some sort of writing on the metallic object up his nose, though whether it was lettering or numbering the restaurant lighting refused to let her discover. Could she take him after dinner to her apartment and find him a seating position next to a strong lamp? She found herself seriously exploring the question. After all (she told herself), most of the men she had taken back to her apartment in the past couple of years had been taken out of curiosity, one way or another. She took a deep gulp of wine and he remarked that the wine was good.

She decided to let him decide. (There's a cold streak in you, Chiyo liked to say, with equal parts amusement and admiration.) She suggested that there must be a lot of risk involved in the kind of banking he did, and she could see him trying to balance the urge to reassure her of his utter competence, not to lay too fine a point on it, and thus play down the element of risk, and the urge to acknowledge what might be a compliment, a projected image of him as a man who savours the thrill of risk. It quickly became apparent that this tightrope act was too much for him. He swayed from one tack to another: a testy distinction between the solidity of the system and the fatal lack of conviction shared by some timorous elements within the system; then a concession that the system might be improved, of course, and that banking evolves as an economy changes, like a living thing; then an apology-question hybrid seeking assurance that he was not boring her with so technical a subject; but before she could reply, had she wanted to, he denounced Chinese communism which incidentally was a very good example of how the free market prevails in the end; then he started to tell a story about a time he had stood up to or gotten the better of or barely escaped from a gang of Chinese thugs, but his doubts about its relevance slowly brought him to a stop. After a moment of looking at it fiercely, he slurped his glass empty and refilled it.

Kiwa knew that she could say nothing, that he would probably now become aloof or resentful after having letting her see such a fumble. (The wisdom of Chiyo: men without women are men unsure of themselves. And here I am supposed to be the one with the cold streak, Kiwa replied.) She was not going to let go of her mystery just yet. The server came to tempt them with dessert – she pretended to think that tiramisu was an everyday word she could not place, but the server corrected her before her date could, so she asked the server for some time to consider, and considered instead how to save the banker some face without knowing for certain why she was doing so.

My grandfather, she said, was ninety-two years old when he passed away last year. The banker, silent since his saga of the Chinese gang petered out, blinked and waited for more, undoubtedly waiting to see what this new topic had to do with him. My mother's father, she said, and slid hair from her bare shoulder that had not been bothering her in the slightest. It is hard to believe that he's gone. The banker said that he was sorry to hear it: had they been close? He lived with us for some of the years I was growing up, she explained, and sometimes he could be kind, very kind, and he was quiet and gentle, but he was very disapproving of so many things. Even though he would say nothing, everyone could feel his disapproval in the air, you couldn't miss it. He would disapprove of this. Of what? Of the whole situation: eating in an "Italian" restaurant, dinner alone with a stranger, this dress. At last the banker took up his role: though we owe great respect to our elders, this is a new age, a new country. For example, he bet that her grandfather disapproved of the internet. She laughed, he did, he did, and brushed that hair from her shoulder again.

It dawned on her then, as she got another half-decent look at the thing up the banker's nose, why she should find herself thinking about her grandfather at this moment: his models. Nothing so fully absorbed the old man than meticulously painting his diecast models of warplanes. The more detail required, the greater concentration and more time required, the prouder he would ultimately be of his accomplishment, a pride that could be measured by the discerning observer by how modest he became when it was noticed. Very tiny numbers, historically correct designations, always perfectly written –as though stencilled, though of course it was all by untrembling free hand– on the sides of those little planes. It could not be a model warplane up his nose, of course, for the size and shape were all wrong, but now it was hard not to see the inscription as numerical designation of some kind, and she decided that she would not have dessert, thank you all the same, and that she was going to ask: what do you say to a glass of wine at my place?

He paid with a golden credit card that she was meant to notice and as she passed through the door he held open she glanced back to see whether the angle and the change in lighting helped make out what that thing was when she tripped and scraped her knee on the sidewalk. The banker was gallant but began talking about the possibility of infection in a cut, even a simple scrape like that one; she winced less from the little pain in the knee than from her inability to see a way not only to interrupt but to extend the invitation and make it plausible. He had an idea – she knew this because he told her he had an idea, and waited for her to ask what it was. Do you know The Midnight Whistle? he asked. It's a nightclub, not far from here, we can go for a drink there and get your knee cleaned and bandaged. He reiterated the dangers of infection as he hailed a taxi. She did not protest. She got into the taxi and imagined herself telling Chiyo the next day: my knee hurt, your friend's friend is way too much of an amateur epidemiologist, but I was determined to find out what that thing was up his nose.

The taxi went east within Shinjuku, the driver talking with the banker about traffic conditions the whole way. The words Midnight Whistle were lit in lavender and even before entering she could tell that without question it was a gay club. Kiwa felt her plans drop out of reach as they stepped inside: the only lights were the blue glow of the bar and itinerant flashes of cellphones. A beefy DJ in a sleeveless tuxedo, ducking out of one set of headphones into another, was doing something with police sirens, a skipping base beat, and Cat Stevens hoping you make a lot of nice friends out there. The banker steered her to the corner of the bar. Do you come here often? she asked. He grinned: as a matter of fact, he recently became one of the owners of the building. Did he own many buildings? she dutifully asked and rubbed her knee. He obtained a clean cloth from one of the bartenders and handed it to her as he shared with her the confidential fact that he owned a few. She probably thought it was expensive, and she would be right. But as a matter of fact, he said, and here the music rendered several words inaudible, then something about a terrible slump with no good projections for the future. Something after that and then something about the bubble economy of a dozen years ago were going to be felt for a long time to come. We have to start thinking differently, he concluded. What would you like to drink?

He recommended something and she sipped it: cold and sweet, difficult to say just how potent. Almost all of the customers were men, as far as she could judge; the bartenders were a blurrier blend. Bad and beware, Cat Stevens was stammering, bad and beware. She did not like clubs and tried to show it discreetly, but turned to see the banker, whose name she realized she could not remember, downing a small row of brightly coloured shots and getting cheered on by a few guys at the bar. She looked carefully at them but saw nothing protruding from any nostrils. Nor did they seem to notice anything sticking out of his nose, but then even she could only just see it and she was standing next to him. How's your knee? All right, she said, but thought to add: it would help if I could sit down somewhere for a few minutes. Hang on, he said. He got a beer from the bar, took her hand, and led her slowly through the jostling bodies to a staircase at the back. She saw that he was speaking as they went but she heard not a word.

Down the narrow stairs and past the toilets, he led her to a door at the end of a long hall and, releasing her hand, fished a key out from his jacket. I want you to know, he was saying when she found she could hear him again, that I appreciate your telling me about your connection with your grandfather. I appreciate your sharing that with me. He unlocked the door and reached inside for a light switch, which took him longer than it would a sober man. He told her again how much he appreciated it. And because she had shared something (he hesitated) so close to her (he hesitated, found the light) with him, he wanted to (he hesitated) share something special with her. Inside the door was another even narrower, much longer staircase leading down. (It's all fun and games until how does the rest of it go, Chiyo whispered in her mind.) He felt her stiffen, lifted up her hand to his chest and looked straight at her. Tell me what you're thinking, he whispered hoarsely and she could smell the rainbow of liqueurs in his breath. Her mouth, she knew, was open, might have been open for several seconds now.

The big picture, she answered after what seemed like a very long time. The pulsating music of the club was very distant. Apparently satisfied with her answer, he led her down the stairs, lightly holding her wrist as though she were somehow more fragile than before. Dozens of stairs, over a hundred, she lost count, kept going down, down, until they came to another door.
 He seemed exhausted when they stopped at the door. Kiwa could just make out the outline of the object in his nose when he showed his profile. This one is for you, he said, gesturing to the door. I can't go in.

Her grandfather promptly reappeared in her thoughts, looking up from his devotional painting of numbers on the side of a miniature warplane, giving a stern glare. She wanted to tell him that tiramisu is a Japanese dish, just say the word a few times and you'll know. The language and the cuisine and the world have changed, they are changing all the time, unforgiving grandfather, and I am reaching out and opening the door.

The door closed decisively behind her and she was in complete darkness but for a distant point of light ahead, towards which she began to walk. The metallic sound to the echoes of her footsteps suggested that she was in some kind of tunnel, an impression that grew stronger as the point of light by degrees expanded to a circle as she grew nearer. Her pace did not change. It's all fun and games, Chiyo, she said to herself, and then repeated aloud a few times, a complement to the rhythm of her walking.

What was from a distance a blurry circle of light came into focus as an aperture and she could see beyond, through, out of the tunnel. She came to a halt when she realized that this was no doorway but a window; her outstretched hand pressed against a screen or lens of some kind, more than twice her height in diameter. And with astounding clarity she could see the polish on the silverware, the slightest crease in the tablecloth, as though it were all magnified and made more vibrant than anything she had seen before, and the extraordinary hand, how it managed the feat of engineering to so gracefully pick up the shimmering glass with its delirious ocean of wine, bring it up, up, up to the lips, perfectly timed to shape themselves to catch the downpour without a drop spilled. There was so much, so enthralling much, she did not know where to look: all of these gigantic movements, fluctuations in detail, arrays of differences between fractions of moments.

And the eyes, it took a little while (how long?), a long while, it took a while for her to see them as wholes, to distinguish one part and colour and motion from another, and as she did she saw them as she had never seen them before, being seen by them but not knowing what they see. Again and again they flashed directly at her, those curious eyes, at just where Kiwa was looking out, and she knew that she was trying not to be seen looking, eating her salad and smiling and regularly scrutinizing that point of observation where Kiwa stood, looking out.

She glanced back into the tunnel behind her, knowing that there was a door somewhere back there in the darkness, an entrance if not an exit, but it was only a glance, an unseeing glance, and she turned again to see what she would do next.

*

Tim Conley's most recent book of fiction is Dance Moves of the Near Future (New Star Books, 2015).

Photo credit: Alice Callas

Michael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-73359671522788463802017-01-24T21:17:00.001-05:002017-01-24T21:17:55.377-05:00Fiction #71: Sarah RoebuckHouse Fire

There's a little girl in my Grade 2 class this year – Lonika. She must be seven years old. She has permanent braids tight along her head and beads to finish off each braid. She is black black black. I think her parents are from Africa. They have that kind of accent, maybe. The boys in the class like Lonika. She is particularly close with Jake. Jake's mum is Ashkenazic, his dad is Sephardic. This is fascinating to me: two Jewish traditions in one family! This is not fascinating to my students; to them, these are arbitrary distinctions. Big deal.

During lessons, I'm up in front of the class at the chalkboard, trying to put on a good show, the kids are sitting in their designated spots on clearly laid-out taped lines on the carpet, and Lonika is rolling around. Other times she gets up, goes to her cubbie and pulls out her water bottle, leisurely drinks from it, and glances at my lesson from time to time. All while I'm trying to explain that, in French, nouns are feminine and masculine. The students think that is fascinating, but mostly just plain weird; Lonika, by the way, does not.

When the kids are at their seats, practising the principles I just taught at the board, Lonika finishes quickly. She comes over to me and complains that she's done already. I furrow my brow and say sternly, "Let me see your work." She goes back to her desk and returns with her work. She shows me. All the answers are correct and written in a handwriting more beautiful than I could do, trying my hardest. She gets it, you see. She doesn't struggle with anything I'm trying to teach this Grade 2 class.

During Self-Selected Reading, she reads with the boys: sports almanacs, superhero comics, astronomy books. The boys usually get more Self-Selected Reading Time because they finish their written assignments quickly. The boys tend to scribble, writing carelessly on the lines provided. The girls are perfectionists, so they take all day to finish one simple thing, their assigned sentences (two sentences) accompanied by elaborate princess and kitty cat drawings in full colour and detail.

*

Lonika has a rude way of interrupting, of answering questions without raising her hand. I punish her each time by showing her my displeasure. I must discipline her. But then, at home, in the school night evening, ravenous, eating dinner, I think, 'So what? Lonika's got stuff to say. Let her talk. Let her talk without raising her hand, without me saying: Yes, Lonika, you may speak now.'

Then, back in the classroom the next day, I forget my resolution, and I punish her again for speaking out without raising her hand. Like my students, I forget to be good.

*

Monday morning, I'm a little bit late going out to the playground to pick up my class for the day. The kids are in line, sort of, chatting and pushing, teasing and talking. One little Asian girl – Lilly – she always has a story; she can't help herself: she's driven to say something unanswerable. (I punish her for that too, with my stern looks, my show of displeasure.)

Lilly says, "Miss! Miss! Lonika's house burned down over the weekend! Well, it's not a house, it's an apartment building, and the fire was so big that everybody living there is in hotels now!"

Lilly looks deep into my face and waits for my reaction. I look beyond her, pretending to think. Seeing no immediate response from me, Lilly hangs her head and looks down at the ground for dramatic effect (there is nothing there).

I look from Lilly to Lonika, who is three or four students from the front of the line-up. She is wearing her knapsack flopping off her shoulders, playing rock-paper-scissors with Jake, and she is laughing because she keeps winning, though there's no strategy. I'm thinking, 'Wow. Would a kid be at school bright and early Monday morning if her place just burned to the ground?'

This news is important because a) there was a fire; b) we know someone who is directly affected by the fire; c) there is some exciting relocation going on, a little camping-out; and d) the story is about an apartment building. This last item is noteworthy, because the families in this neighbourhood all live in single-family houses. Only some of the bussed-in kids live in apartment buildings. People who live in apartment buildings are automatically poor and should be pitied. Lonika, as it turns out, is one of the bussed-in kids, and is by definition, not part of the tightly-knit neighbourhood of house-living families whose kids all go to our school.

So this is a triple-whammy for Lonika: she is an outsider as a bussed-in kid, she is already pitied for living in an apartment, and now she has lost her lousy apartment. (But a few moments after the first bell Monday morning, the kids have just learned that, really, an apartment is better than nothing.) She is also a visible minority – she is black black black, as I said – but nobody says this out loud, because in these politically correct days, it is practically illegal to mention it.

I look back to Lilly, who is still dying to get a reaction out of me, and I say something like: "Oh, my my! That is terrible! That is terrible! That is just terrible! Oh, my ..." Then I wave to the other nineteen kids and say, "Okay! Time to come in! Let's go!" and I lead them through the double doors, into the school corridor, to start our week together.

*

Well, I am walking down the corridor, it's the first recess of the day, and the principal pokes her head out to call me in to her office.

"Elizabeth! You must know already! One of your students – Lonika – Lonika's house burned down over the weekend! Well, it's not a house, it's an apartment building, and the fire was so big that everybody living there is in hotels now!"

I catch my breath and the principal keeps talking. "Okay," says the principal, crossing her legs the other way. She has already figured everything out.

"We'll give her lunches. We have ladies, we have parents lined up to make her lunches, and we have donations: clothes, non-perishable foods and toys and school supplies and everything this little girl would need."

I know that the whole fire story is true because in a crisis like this, people feel a sudden need to be useful, so they go out and buy stuff that they know the kid doesn't really need, like school supplies. (The board has always provided school supplies for every kid from Kindergarten to Grade 8.) But Lonika'll take those pencils and erasers, because then it'll feel like a luxury.

*

The apartment building fire story is all over the news all week: first-person accounts, keeping track of families and interviewing them so the public readership can know what having a fire feels like and what it's like to lose everything. I feel proud of her: yes, she's one of my little girls. From Room 10. That's my class. She's so brave.

And all week I've been watching this little girl; I keep an eye on her, to get a sense of where she's at, a little protective, how she's feeling, what she could be going through.

And you know what? If no one had told me this little girl's world just burned down, if no one had told me this little girl just lost everything, I would've never known it. She still rolls around on the carpet. She still gets up in the middle of lessons and drinks from her water bottle. (She has a new water bottle, by the way; it is very shiny, and I think she's quite proud of it.) And she reads those Spiderman comics with Jake and she still gives me the whole same old, "Miss, I'm done my work" three minutes after I've assigned it. She is even on top of the ten weekly spelling test words. This little girl hasn't skipped a beat.

*

Today, I was writing out a list of verbs on chart paper and she finally comes up to me in a private moment, and I can see that she's in some kind of distress. "Miss, Miss," she says. She shows me a paper cut just under her thumbnail. Her eyes are watery and puffy. Her bottom lip is quivering.

Now, teachers are supposed to be extra-vigilant and take every students' little wound seriously (for liability reasons, so the board doesn't get sued) and send them to the school office for ice or bandages; though often, I must confess, I look at the injury, brush the student off and say, "You're okay. Get back to work."

But I bend down and lay a hand on her arm."Oh, oh," I say, and scrunch up my face next to hers. "Oh, you go to the office for that, honey. You go to the office and get yourself a band-aid." She thinks about this for a moment, then shrugs her shoulders. "Okay," she says.

Lonika goes to the office and and brings back a band-aid and gives it to me and I peel off the plastic for her and place it carefully on her little black finger. then it'll have served its purpose: a little attention from a grown-up. A band-aid is a little acknowledgement of pain. And for a moment, that's what Lonika wants; that's what kids want: they just want a little acknowledgement. And then they go off skipping, like this.

*

Sarah J. Roebuck earned an M.A. in Windsor, Ontario. Her poetry has appeared in Understorey (2016), Nashwaak Review (2014), The Antigonish Review (2014, 2002), The Maynard (2013) Dalhousie (2004), Other Voices (2004), the Lance (1994-1998) and Generation (1998). Her articles have appeared in Women Writing Letters II (Gailey Press, University of Toronto, 2014), Today's Parent (2006), and ARC (McGill, 2000, 2002). She is a teacher and lives with her son, Ted, in Toronto.Michael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-91502416717086452922017-01-24T20:58:00.002-05:002017-01-24T20:58:40.721-05:00Fiction #71: Leanne SimpsonRibbons

It wasn't so much a roadtrip as one day we all got in a car and tried to drive away from what was dragging us down. I said yes without knowing if Sheila and Mike were still together, and I guess I'm not much of a detective because we're four hours in and I still can't tell. I search for hidden meaning behind brushes of Cheetos-stained fingers and sips traded from a can of grape soda and find only the profound certainty that relationships are one of those grotesque things I like to examine from afar, like roadkill or belly button lint.

When I tell people I'm in a band with my neighbour and his girlfriend, I think there's an unsaid pity that hangs in the air, like post-shower condensation or the last person at a funeral. I used to think it was because we were a three-piece, but I've recently come to the conclusion that my life choices are generally considered to be poor, that I should be investing in education instead of band logos and the only person paying in the end will be me.

Sheila wakes up first, asks if there are any more Cheetos left (I ate them all). I point-blank ask her if she broke up with Mike and she looks at me like I just ran over her dog. This is a roadtrip, she says. This is a safe space. She starts drumming on the glove compartment and I wish I could jot it down, maybe write an album on the road. I mention it to Sheila and she stops immediately. This is why we operate out of Mike's basement.

I've known Sheila for about a year and a half now and she's always had this energy like she could lift a tow truck off a baby in a crisis, except she's almost always in crisis and no one ever calls her for help. I thought about it once but I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to pay her back and it would just be this thing held over my head until I died, at which point I wouldn't have much use for the help anyway.

Sheila looks out the window when I ask about Mike's dad. He's better, she says quietly. Better is a good, safe word to use because it's comparative – better than yesterday, better than Gord Downie, better than dead. It leaves you just enough hope to curl up into a white ribbon and pin to your chest.

I want Mike's dad to be okay for selfish reasons, which include the following: he used to drive our band equipment around, I want Mike to stop smoking weed so Sheila will shut up about it, and I am uncomfortable with mortality. Those weren't listed in any particular order, but when Mike wakes up and asks me to pull over for a toke, I get irrationally angry. He doesn't pull the grieving card – which is still a work in progress – but I do it anyways because my head is somewhere back in Orangeville and it's too late to turn around.

I have a bag of Cheetos tucked under each arm like a pair of footballs when I spot him sitting on the ground by the pumps. Sheila's in the bathroom so it's a perfect opportunity to ask about the state of things. He is a much better source of information. We're done, he says.

Far too late, I realize that my face is not configured into an appropriate position for this kind of conversation. Mike doesn't seem to care, aims his rant at the ground instead. I told her it wouldn't matter if she left again, like I don't have enough on my plate. I nod at the wrong times. Secretly, I think he's right – Sheila's been leaving since she got here.

We don't need her, I say, throwing an arm around him. There are plenty of good drummers out there. Mike turns to me and I can tell I've said the wrong thing – there's a look on his face like I have spinach in my teeth but I haven't had a salad in weeks, months if we're being honest here. You're incredible, he says, and I feel anything but. I don't follow him when he walks away. For me, it's always been about the music. It's the best we could ever get along.

Mike and Sheila are deep in conversation when I get back to the car. I throw the Cheetos in the back and give them space, overhearing snippets like completely delusional and awkward breakup. I trust that they are discussing the impending end of their romantic relationship and not the gaping social error that I have committed, and wander towards the portable bathroom.

The voice finds me before I can place it – floats into my stall like dandelion seeds and settles deep in the pit of my belly. She's not pitch perfect but she's raw, like a worn-down piece of sandpaper from my old man's workbench. I burst out of the outhouse and nearly tackle her to the floor. She is very clearly homeless.

Your voice is beautiful, I breathe into her ear. She looks suspicious so I take a few steps back. Where are you headed? She shrugs. Hopefully the city, she says. I drag her back to the car with me. Sheila and Mike are less-than-impressed with my unsigned talent, but they don't move to stop me as I toss her wrinkled knapsack in with the Cheetos. It's your car, says Mike. It's your funeral, says Sheila.

Elsie used to play the accordion in a Ukrainian orchestra, but sings now because an accordion is too tough to carry around. We could use an accordion, I say. No one agrees with me. Mike and Sheila have struck an unsteady truce in the backseat, hands holding hands clenched around another grape soda. Things are improving.

This is what our sound is missing, I tell them. They don't believe me so I get Elsie to harmonize with the radio until they too are nodding along. We're still done, says Mike, but I don't believe him either. Elsie passes out a half hour into the drive and we sit in silence, driving towards the next best thing to come our way. This is a roadtrip. This is a safe space. I think of Mike's dad and the ribbon pinned to his coat and the ribbons in Elsie's hair, and I wonder if this is as good as it gets – not better, but different. I never like it when a band adopts a new sound but maybe it's better to have a new sound than no sound at all, and when we are this dangerously close to silence, it's hard not to want to make noise.

*

Leanne Simpson is a mental health columnist and video blogger from Toronto, Canada. Outside of her advocacy work for SickNotWeak, she was recently named as an Emerging Writer of 2016 by the Ontario Book Publishers Organization. Her creative nonfiction has won multiple awards, including the Scarborough Fair International Creative Writing Contest. Leanne's writing has been published in Matrix Magazine, PAC'N HEAT, The Citron Review, and What's Your Story, Toronto. She is currently working on a memoir after completing a fellowship in the Master of Professional Communication program at Ryerson University.

Photo credit: Scarborough FairMichael Brysonhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-17512954837780091202017-01-24T20:46:00.000-05:002017-01-25T19:03:23.612-05:00Fiction #71: Sandra MaxsonThe Fire

As the house burned down, and she watched everything they'd gathered or made in their life together float first up on rising rivers of hot air, then down like flakes of powdery, grey snow, Jennifer felt a kind of lightness.

"Like the universe knew I need a new start, and sent it in this spectacular and ironic way," she said to the paramedic. "It looks like it's destroying my life, but it isn't. The old is burning away to make way for the new."

The medic wrapped a shiny, tinfoil sheet around her shoulders and told her she was in shock. Jen pulled it tight around her with her hands inside, smiling at her friend Beth. "Look," Jen said, poking the blanket from the inside. "I'm popcorn! Pop! Pop! Pop!"

Later, sniffing a crumpled tissue because she was convinced her tears smelled like smoke, Jen thought maybe the paramedic had been right.

When Jen and Megan had parted ways, some weeks previous, the dissection of their life as a couple had been absolute. Megan had seized her new identity as Jen's ex-wife and utterly relinquished attachment to the house and any of its contents. Still, Jen couldn't help thinking Megan would want to know.

She answered without saying hello, just "Jen, it's 3 a.m." and a pause while she waited to hear if Jennifer was drunk, or if someone was dead. "Jen?" Jennifer could hear her getting ready to hang up.

"Hi Meg," she said finally. It was all she could think of to say, the phone cradled tight to her ear, holding on against the overwhelming wave of loss. This is all that's left, she thought, vague impatience and charred remains.

"Are you alright?"

"No," Jen said. "Not really."

Megan sighed, a deep breath weighted with irritation. "You can't just call," she said. "At three in the morning for no reason."

Of course she assumed no reason. "Sorry to bother you but the house burned down."

"The house?"

Jen felt a rush of legitimacy, and a sudden, virtuous anger. "Yes, the house. I'm calling because you should know our house burned the fuck down."

*

The coffee shop was almost empty. Having exhausted to topic of the house fire in the first minute (It started? Electrical. And everything's? Gone, yes.) they sat across from one another trying to think up other safe topics.

"How's work?" Megan asked finally. As long as they left out any mention of certain coworkers, work was a safe zone.

"Pointless."

"You always say that."

"Extremely pointless."

"Quit then."

"Yeah right. I have a mortgage, you know."

They both stopped short.

"Fuck," Megan said. "You still have to pay the mortgage?"

"No, I guess not." They had been nothing if not well insured.

Megan's gaze slid over the customer at the counter, focusing vaguely on the sandwich specials. A coolness settled between them, dull and lifeless as lake water.

"I should go," Megan said.

It's not like she thought the fire would get them back together or anything, but Jennifer had expected more than this single coffee date from Megan. A place to stay for a few days, or some clothes. They were the same size, sort of. Not really, anymore, since Jen quit soccer. Well, shoes anyway. She could have offered shoes.

The café suddenly filled. A guy with a man bun looked pointedly at the empty cups on their table. Megan took the hint. "I'm heading home. You coming?" she asked, digging in her bag for her wallet. She looked up and saw Jennifer's face, and said. "Oh shit. Sorry, I just meant, are you leaving now too."

"No, of course. I didn't think…."

"This doesn't change anything."

"No, I know."

*

They'd bought the house originally for the family they were imminently to create. A donor had been found, a handsome theatre director content to be cool Uncle Rick. They planned simultaneous insemination, an idea that struck Jen now as analogous to those adolescent suicide pacts involving aspirin – overly dramatic and ultimately ineffectual. First their cycles wouldn't sync up (story of their life, really), then Rick withdrew. Meg lost her job and got a better one, and pretty soon the would-be nursery was a home office they couldn't do without. Before they knew it, five years had passed and they had stopped talking about babies and, in fact, had more or less stopped talking altogether. Their therapist had suggested that Meg's affair (hardly an affair, though, a drunken one night stand at a conference) had been a way to finalize the brokenness of the marriage. A corner turned that could not be unturned. Following that logic, Jen wondered if she – not fifty year old wiring – had finally found a way to end her belief in the possibility of reconciliation. You want over, Meg? I'll show you over. I'll light that fucker up.

Except it hadn't worked.

Jen wandered toward the house (or what was left of it. The site, maybe she should call it). The bulldozers had come and gone; it seemed fast but the fire department had explained it was a hazard now, and she could be liable if someone went in and was hurt.

"Why would anyone go in?" she'd asked. She herself felt almost physically repelled by the sight of it, as if it were the burned remains of a body, not a building.

"Kids," he'd replied. "Or people think there's something to steal."

"So if a thief hurt himself breaking into my burned out house to rob me, I could be sued?"

The fire guy said, "It's happened."

Jen doubted it but signed the work order anyway.

She got the insurance check, and then a realtor called and made an offer on the land. She agreed almost immediately. It's not like she was going to rebuild a house. What did she need a house for? Beth pointed out a vacancy in the apartment building next door, and now she was single, with a new, empty apartment and money – a lot of it – and what felt, on one hand, like freedom but also, on the other, like a terrifying, unhinged variety of abandonment.

Her boss offered her time off to "help her deal with things." The absence of routine was not, it turned out, helpful in the least. She lay on the mattress in her otherwise empty apartment and googled "forest stewardship" to read about the regenerative properties of wildfire. She found a lighter, and singed the hair on her arm. She began to scare herself. She began to wonder if 38 was too early for a midlife crisis, although this would suggest she'd live to 76, which struck her as more than generous.

She fell asleep in the mid afternoon and dreamed she had become anorexic. She woke up, tired and hungry, and went in search of something greasy to eat.

In the alley behind her apartment she stopped short, feeling a swift rise of anxiety before she even realized she was sniffing the air like a dog.

A rat ran past her leg and she jumped back. It stopped and looked up at her, and she realized it was a small, grey cat.

She inhaled. She smelled smoke but then again, she was always smelling smoke these days. She'd stopped saying can you smell that? to people around her. They couldn't. It wasn't there. She was going crazy.

The little cat meowed at her. It was scared to death, poor thing.

She crouched down slowly and held out one finger, the SPCA-approved cat greeting she'd learned as a teenage volunteer. He bumped his miniscule pink nose against her, permitting her finger to stroke his cheek. He was just a baby, she thought. She moved her hand slowly toward the back of his head thinking to catch him and turn him in to the local shelter for adoption. She reached her arm a little further and her bag swung down off her shoulder. The kitten bolted away, startled, and ran right under a rusted dumpster. Jennifer realized the smoke she could smell was real, and it was coming from the garbage bin. Which was up against her apartment building. And directly above the little kitten. Shit.

She looked around quickly, saw no one and nothing to help. She crouched down further and peered under the dumpster. He'd backed himself into a corner, wedged into a tiny gap between the wall and a broken bike frame. He mewed again, a high-pitched, anxious sound. She backed up and got down on her belly, ignoring the gritty concrete, and sniper crawled herself into the space between the bin and the brick wall. It was hot; the metal side of the dumpster almost, but not quite, hot enough to burn her. Jen's eyes began to water and she held her breath, trying not to think about discarded needles or condoms or about the lung conditions that may result from the thick, putrid smoke of burning garbage. Her arm stretched, fingers grasping, finally catching him – barely – by the fur then adjusting and getting a better grip on his nape. She pulled and shimmied back, dragging him along until they were both clear.

She held him by the nape of his neck, his legs clawed wind mills, emitting a seemingly endless hiss of hostility for her efforts. She coughed and ran a grubby hand across her face and through her hair. Her hat dislodged and fell, landing upside down beside her. She put the cat down between her legs, keeping her grip on his nape. He contracted to a grey, matted ball, his belly tight against the ground, the hiss now a low, throaty threat. Jen held on in a protective restraint, knowing he'd dash off the moment she released him and feeling, in the space of those few minutes, responsible for him.

A man rounded the corner and she waved him over, coughing again. When he reached her, he crouched down, and put a handful of coins in her hat. "Here," he said. "For some food for your cat."

What the hell? "I'm a millionaire," she said. Practically. If you rounded up.

"Of course you are," he said, standing and brushing off the front of his jeans and carrying on down the alley. "Good for you."

"That dumpster's on fire," she called, pointing. "Hey!" He walked on, not believing or bothering to care.

Jen reached around to her back pocket, working out her cell phone with one hand.

"9-1-1 What is your emergency?"

Life's great multiple choice question. What was the nature of her emergency, Jen wondered. Abandonment? Neediness? Maybe, but first things first. "Fire," she said. The kitten went quiet under her hand. "It's a fire."

*

Sandra Maxson is a writer and public servant. She lives and works on the west coast, dividing her time between Vancouver and Victoria BC, with her wife and three children.

Photo by My Girl Photography.Michael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-82501410448718233632016-10-30T17:24:00.003-04:002016-10-30T17:24:49.309-04:00Fiction #70New fiction! Issue #70

Surveillance Notes by Sidonie P. Hynes

Red Ball by Christian McPherson

The Woman's Battalion of Death by Liz Betz

Your Messiah by Jayne Collins

Submissions now open for #71

Special thanks to all who have been submitting. Enjoy. Michael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-72704764972274081412016-10-30T17:18:00.000-04:002016-11-06T09:13:35.811-05:00Fiction #70: Sidonie P. Hynes

Surveillance Notes

We're running surveillance. I don't want to be the last one to arrive, so I race. I take the 401 to the 404, to the 407, head west to Hurontario, exit to the north. I exchange fluids at Timmy's, gas up at Shell, and arrive at 4:47am.

I drive down the target's street, past his house, looking for the others. It's still dark, save for the streetlamps. So far, it's just me. I confirm the target's plate. Grab the eye. I get set up—close enough to see his car, far enough I won't stand out—tucked in amongst the dew covered vehicles.

It's been five years since our surveillance techniques course. The instructor's words are as fresh in my mind as the first time he said them: Ain't rocket science, he'd say. First car there grabs the eye. Want your vehicle to blend in? Think of a box of Smarties.

Two weeks divided between the classroom and on-the-road training. The class instructor drew simple diagrams, little box cars with pointed front ends. His black marker squeaked across the flip-board. He drew arrows up, down and across, and circled things for emphasis. He'd rap on the diagrams with the end of his marker to emphasize key points he was making.

I crank down on the emergency brake and restart my engine to get rid of my daytime running lights. I twist the end of my mini Maglite and point it at my Greater Toronto Area map-book. Red light casts a shimmering veil over the page. I make quick notes and sketches: the street, the house, the vehicle in the driveway. I wait.

The night before, I'd packed snacks: nothing sticky, drippy, or stinky. Nothing requiring tools to open or eat. I'd set the coffee maker and my alarm for 3:40 am, draped clothes over the edge of the tub, and hit the sack early.

When my earplugs dislodged, I'd startled. The snoring! I smacked the pillow beside my husband's head, replaced the plugs, flipped to adjust the pillow between my legs. I did this twice before I settled.

I fell asleep.

The alarm went off.

I'd costumed quickly: a camouflage of earthy browns and blacks, grabbed an old ball-cap to conceal my light blond hair. Blend in.

Now I watch the target's house and car. I watch for lights in windows, on cars. I check my mirrors, the time, my pulse. Nothing moves. I wait.

The radio squawks the other cars' arrivals.

"I've got the eye," I say. "Everything's open."

"I'll set up north," says the silver Impala. He's team leader for surveillance today. Good guy.

"I can take him south," adds another.

Nick doubles to the south in the burgundy van.

"Your lights are on, Smitty," the silver car says to the grey van.

Right, Smith—the newbie. I jot down: Smitty/grey van. Keep forgetting that guy's name.

The eastern sky is a soft, glowing ribbon of peach. A silky smile, wistful on the horizon, it stretches into a swath of powder blue. It steeps and lightens, bleaches through the heavy shroud of night. I tweeze the plastic flap on my coffee's lid until it sticks open, test the temperature with a small sip, then a longer one. I take a slow, deep inhale-exhale. I slurp and swallow until at last I tilt it right up and empty it, still wanting more.

"Okay," I say, once everything's covered off, everyone's set up, quieted down and ready to go. "The black Toyota Camry is in the driveway." I confirm our target's plate and we wait.

Half an hour passes. "No change," I announce. Everyone clicks their radio button to acknowledge me; everyone except the newbie.

"10-4, copy that," says Smitty.

I race against the pre-dawn light; tilt my seat back so the door frame blocks my silhouette; adjust the mirrors to get the best view. I'm motionless, except for my eyes that scan about until a light or a movement or a shape halts my attention. I study a dark form in the target's kitchen window. Was it there a minute ago? It doesn't move. I keep scanning: the doors, windows, driveways, streets, sidewalks. I keep coming back to that dark shape but it never changes. Eventually I'm satisfied it's nothing.

The nag and pull of a full bladder tugs at me like a child. Not yet. Go away! I can hardly focus. Fuck, I hate when this happens! "Can someone take the eye? I gotta do a nature."

Ridiculous phrase, 'to do a nature'! Like I could just hop outta the car and piss on that tree. I'm reminded of the sign my Dad posted along the country road in front of his bush: NO TREEPISSING! TREEPISSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED!

Nope. No tree-pissing for me. No way I'm peeing in some bottle either! Sometimes I imagine a first-aid mask attached to a long hose, maybe a hole in the floor. And me: a Mona Lisa smile. Heard some outdoor stores carry those gadgets. Not standard issue yet. No, I just do the homework: google the gas stations and coffee shops and save them to my favorites. Smith covers off north, the silver Impala takes the eye, and I beat it to the Shell station down the street. "I'll be down for five on cell," I say.

Luxury: a private toilet and civilian clothes. That means no gun leaning from my holster below the stall divider. It sits on my waist in a fanny-pack instead, warms—and kept warm by—my abdomen. Better hurry. Nothing's changed when I return, so I double up to the south.

Doors open and close, people flit about on foot, cars pass, traffic builds. A woman in dress suit runs, heels clacking, after her bus. I imagine her sitting in some frigid workspace, hunched over a portable heater hidden at her feet. She'll take her lunch outside today. She'll soak up that beautiful sun until she wilts—her clothes all clammy-stuck to her back. Then she'll go back in and freeze solid.

"No change," says the eye at nine forty-five.

At ten-fifteen a man appears in the adjacent driveway. Slumped in my seat with my cap pulled down, I slide my knapsack over the radio console. I remove the binoculars from the passenger seat and tuck them in my jacket. I kill the radio, crook my index finger towards my eye as if wiping a tear, crack the window down a bit and offer a weak hello.

"Why are you sitting here in front of my house?"

"Sorry," I say. "I needed to get away for a bit—didn't mean to—"

"Oh?" His eyebrows beef up.

"I'm just upset. My husband and—"

"Are you okay?"

"Just upset—needed a little time." I bite at my bottom lip.

 You just take your time. Sure you're okay though?"

"I'm okay," I insist.

"Okay," he says, and nods.

I nod back and he nods to me again. He's leaving but then he stops—looks back. I wave him on. Then he goes, lumbers up his driveway and disappears. In one swift, continuous motion I release the emergency brake, twist the radio volume up, start my engine and drive away from there. Well, who'd a thunk? The helpless young damsel was packing a 9mm semi-automatic Smith n' Wesson in her little black pouch!

"1-Delta-25 from 1-Delta-27," I radio for an update. Zip, crackle, zip. "1-Delta-25, any change? You guys moving?" More static; my cell rings. It's the silver Impala.

"Where are you?"

"Took some heat—had to kill the radio."

"Oh?"

"You guys moving?"

"We're southbound on Hurontario. Target's alone in the black Camry. I'll keep the line open till you're back in range."

"Thanks bud."

Phone to my ear, I'm off. I can hear the lead car transmit through the Impala's radio.

"…Ok he's signalling for the 407 west. Who's with me?" says the eye.

"Got your back," says Sammy.

"Okay, he's on the ramp, heading westbound 407. I'll stay with him until you're good to go, says the eye.

"I'm good," says Sammy.

"He's yours then," says the eye.

"Okay, no change," says Sammy, taking over. "Target's moving to the centre lane, I've two vehicles for cover."

I reach the on-ramp for the 407 westbound. I merge and take off, tires whir against the concrete. I weave and dart and brake and rev through the sludge of traffic like some adrenaline fueled crazy-woman. I've no choice though. If I don't catch up, I won't live it down back at the office.

"Can't drive worth a shit," they'll say when I'm out of earshot. Yet, if I'm in an accident, it's my ass that's grass.

I know how tricky it can be to catch up. If we're on a major highway and the target exits without signalling, I might have to continue straight, let the next car take over. The team could be half way to Barrie before I catch up again. You want to master surveillance in Toronto? It's all about knowing the majors.

Take the new guy, Smitty. He's probably done surveillance three or four times now but he's new to the city. He might know Yonge Street, but other than that he's lost. I bet he's got a map book open on his steering wheel right now! Even when he knows the majors, the book will be open on the seat beside him. Every chance he gets, he'll sneak a look at it, check for exits, parallels, one ways, dead-ends. Never want to take a target down a dead end street. Guaranteed to be spotted and just like that—you're burned! Might as well pack up the team and go home. A dumb move like that could jeopardise the project, not to mention your reputation.

I'm skipping along past the Mavis Road exit when the radio static becomes broken chatter. Getting warmer. "Thanks buddy, I'm almost there," I say, and hang up. When the voice of the guy in the lead car becomes clear, I slow down and scan the lanes.

There in the middle lane is Smitty's van.

I tuck in. "Got your back Smitty," I say.

Beyond the Credit River, the target exits to Mississauga Road. The gold Ford takes the eye. "Okay, we're turning left, going southbound Mississauga Road," he says. "Got GlaxoSmithKline on our left and a fresh red in the distance. He's checkin' his mirrors boys." The gold Ford takes him onto Meadowvale.

"You look like a train going around that bend," I say.

"Can't help that," says the newbie, "got no cover."

In my mind, I'm thinking idiot! "Smitty, pull into Mary Kay."

Smitty veers left in to the Mary Kay parking lot, braises the soft shoulder, spits up the gravel. I follow him—minus the drama—and circle back to face the road. A vehicle passes and I motion for Smitty to go. He sails outta there spinning more rocks. What a dick!

Ron takes the target past Rapistan Court. Nick takes him past Meadowpines. "He's signalling left for the Purolator building and I can't go in," says Nick.

"I got 'em," says Smitty. "He's parking now: 2600 Meadowvale. He's out of the vehicle; he's heading for the building."

I tuck into a laneway across the street. I can barely see the target's vehicle, just the tip of its nose. Once we've set ourselves up, I check the time, jot down some notes. I'm missing a description of what our guy's wearing, so I know I'm about to be razzed. "What's he wearing today boys?" I ask.

"Sleeping again?"

"Yeah, Nicky, it's that exciting voice of yours, gets me every time."

"Right on!" he says. His snort-laugh cut short.

"Cut the chatter," says Smitty.

"Ooooooooooh," someone says.

Nick calls my cell with the target's description. I scribble. He asks for the time we got here.

"Ten thirty five. Think he's surveillance conscious?"

"The target or fuckin' Smitty?" he grunts.

"Yeah, Smitty's gonna get us burned. Had people looking outta windows back there. I bet they call Peel."

"Think he's spooked," says Nick. "Sure acts like it."

We're interrupted by Smitty. "Think I'll go in, buy something," he whispers.

The team leader says no.

"Okay, he's coming out," says Smittty, his words sounding like spit against his mike. "He's out now—heading to the car…door's open…now he's in. Hold on, he's getting out again. He's got a package and he's heading back to the store. I'll go in."

"No."

"I'm going in," he says.

"No—!" says the team leader again.

"He went in," I say. "I've got the eye from across the street."

"Better not get us burned," says Ron.

Five minutes drag by and still nothing. Then the door opens and the target's out. "Heads up people," I say. "He's out and heading to his vehicle. He's in. Okay, we got reverse lights—now he's backing around. He's heading for the street."

We take him south to Meadowpines, west to Winston Churchill, then north.

"Smitty with us?" asks the team leader.

"Still picking out his envelope," snorts Nick.

"401's coming up, boys," I say.

"Seriously," says Nick. "His car was sitting empty when I went by, and I'm at the end."

"He's got his right flicker on," I say.

"Right behind you," says Ron.

We go eastbound 401, and we're off! The target's skipping along now. I check to see who's with us. A series of radio clicks.

"I'll call Smitty," says Nick.

"No change," I say. I pass the Apple Factory Farm Market, the Mississauga Road exit. "He's in lane three." Nick tells us Smitty's line's busy. "Okay, he's moving back to lane two," I add. "Mavis exit's coming up. Ron, can you take him?"

"10-4," he says.

"Heads-up," calls the team leader. "Info from the wire room: he's gonna do some shopping. Likely take Hurontario to Square One mall; we'll set up on him there."

The target heads south as predicted. But instead of signalling right, he signals left. Ron can't go with him. "I'm scrogged," says Ron.

"I'm scrogged too," says the silver Impala.

So I take him again. But as I'm hitting the intersection the light goes yellow. I say, "go-go-go" to the delivery van turning ahead of me, horns blaring from the oncoming vehicles as I tuck in behind and turn on the red.

"Sorry!" I say out loud.

The black Camry vanishes around the curve, and when I come around, he's gone. Must have turned here. Now I'm in a parking lot. Gone! No wait: I see the rear of his car descending a ramp.

There's something eerie about the underground, the dim light and low ceilings. Cars packed tight in coffin rows, surrounded by cement pillars. Part of me wants to tuck into one of the empty spots—make myself disappear like a Smartie—but I keep moving along the row, around the corner, down another ramp, to another massive catacomb with very few vehicles. His car is here. It's empty.

It takes a few minutes for Nick to find me. We need to switch vehicles because he's got the van. I get the camera ready. Then I sit and watch, and snack and fiddle. An hour passes, then another. It's warm. My phone rings.

"Yeah?"

"You still alive in there?" asks the team leader.

"Barely. Sure it's happening today?"

"Yes, ma'am," he says. "Might have to hang tight though. A bit of overtime."

"Sure thing," I say.

As time passes it's hard to stay focused. My stomach starts rumbling and I'm outta food. Then the heavy door I've been watching for hours swings open and there's our guy with some woman. The door booms shut and they're coming my way. I hear them, but can't make it out.

"He's out with an unknown female," I say, hoping they can't hear me. My heart's beating fast and hard as they move in front of my van. Then they're by me. "The girl's Asian. Slim, 'bout five feet, long hair: past her shoulders. Brown dress pants, a beige top. I'm guessing mid-thirties."

They approach another vehicle, pop the trunk, my view is blocked. Then the trunk closes and they're coming back toward me. I kill the volume on my portable radio. Want to melt into the upholstery. Keep walking, keep walking. They pass by and head toward our target's car.

"They're at the target's vehicle now," I say. My camera tucked in by the headrest. The target opens the trunk, lifts out a box and opens it. The girl says something, nods. Then she takes—what appears to be—a wad of money from an envelope, hands it to him.

I zoom in and focus. Yup, it's money! Got ya!

Zip-zip-zip-zip goes the camera. When they turn their heads and point my way, I keep taking pictures. My heart sprints. They can't see me. I stop and hold my breath as she approaches, passes by me again. Then she hops in her car and pulls up beside him. While they transfer boxes to her trunk, I sing in my head:

I Got You Babe!  Zip-zip-zip-zip. I keep shooting as they close the trunks, shake hands. Then she's back to her car and away.

I call out her vehicle's description and Nick grabs the plate.

On the drive back to the office, I play it over and over in my head. I'm the forgotten Smartie, wedged between the cushions of the rec-room couch. Invisible even to the dog that sniffs, so close, I smell his humid breath.

Back at the barn there's a debriefing. The surveillance guys all drop what they're doing. Drag their chairs to the middle of the bullpen. The team leader sits on the corner of an empty desk.

"First of all, good work guys and gals," he says. "We made some real progress today." He floats a satisfied look at each one of us, then comes right back to me and grins.

I'm thinking Su-per-woman! I manage to contain my excitement.

"Those pics—the exchange and the unknown female—the nail in the coffin," he says. "But even more important is teamwork. That's what makes or breaks us." Then he looks at Smitty.

Idiot's got it coming now! I look at Nick. He smiles back, his eyebrows raised.

"Sometimes it takes going that little extra distance, to get the job done," the team leader says. "Good work today, Smitty!"

What the fuck?

"If it weren't for you going in the Purolator Store…" he says to Smitty before turning to the rest of us. "Young Smitty here witnessed the target on his cell phone, that's how we learned about the meet, and why we stayed on him so long."

"No fucking way!"

"That's it, that's all folks!" he adds. "Please get your notes to me before you leave. Tomorrow we'll confirm the girl's identity and address, and do up a general warrant for her phone records. We'll have some pretty compelling material to include in our next wiretap rewrite."

Everyone's looking at the big hero-boy. He sits there like it's nothing and grins.

*

Sidonie P. Hynes is a retired, twenty-two year veteran of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. She spent eight of these years policing in Newfoundland and Labrador, followed by fourteen more working throughout the Greater Toronto Area. In 2011, she retired at the rank of corporal. She currently lives in Wolfville, Nova Scotia with her husband, daughters and two golden retrievers. Her story "Nice Cop" was published in the Summer 2016 Women and Justice Edition of Understorey Magazine.

Photo credit: Princess Cruises.

Michael Brysonhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-44275117763394938332016-10-30T16:55:00.003-04:002016-10-30T16:55:43.034-04:00Fiction #70: Christian McPherson

Red Ball

It was manufactured in an industrial plant in Shenzhen, China. It travelled by truck to the coast, where it was loaded onto a ship destined for Canada. Once it had crossed the Pacific and docked in Vancouver it was transported by CN Rail to Toronto, at which point it was gathered up alongside its cylindrical brothers and sisters and put on a truck to Ottawa. It arrived at a warehouse where it sat for several weeks until it was placed on a smaller truck and brought to a toy store. The red ball sat amongst the others, waiting for someone to purchase it.

* * *

Q was soaring at a hundred and ten clicks across the bridge at Lac Des Deux Montagnes in Julie, his rusting, baby-blue Mercedes, who was emitting a James-Bond cloud of blue smoke. He whipped out his package of Drum tobacco and Zig Zag papers, and with the dexterity of a rhesus monkey one-handed a beautiful chalk stick. He popped it into his mouth and looked over at the Squid, who was tapping out a Marlboro for himself.

"Smell that gas? Roll down your window man," yelled Q over the popping, hissing static, as he spun the radio dial looking for some Stones, or Zeppelin, or something that he thought was kick-ass. The Squid rolled down his window and lit up with a snap of his Zippo. Q leaned towards the Squid, keeping his eyes on the road, waiting to receive a light as if he were waiting to receive communion.

"Thanks," said Q out of the corner of his mouth, as he finally tuned in Robert Plant singing Nobody's Fault But Mine.
Q looked over at the Squid, and the Squid looked out the window, over the water.

"What's wrong, something bugging you?," asked Q as his cigarette bobbed up and down as if it were conducting Jimmy Page's solo.

"Nah, I'm fine," said the Squid before taking a long, greedy drag on his Marlboro.

Q kept looking over at the Squid, looking at his stiff posture, his wild eyes, which had fallen to the grey, omnipresent duct tape of Julie's dashboard.

"Come on Squid, what's up?"

"I just want to get there and get rid of it."

The Squid leaned forward and tapped his ashes onto the pile of butts in the overflowing ashtray, which was also held together by more grey duct tape. He slumped back. The Squid took another drag and exasperatedly blew out smoke, like he had been interrogated for hours and had finally been broken.

Q turned to the Squid and gave him a big grin and then started to laugh.

"You worry far too much," said Q.

The Squid looked like he hadn't slept in weeks. The wind messed up his greasy Elvis hair. He whipped out his comb and sculpted it back into form, like he was spreading icing on a cake. That's when Q saw the lights in his rear-view just after they crossed into Ontario. Then he saw the lights in front of them too.

"Shit," said Q.

The Squid sat up straight looking at the two OPP cruisers, lights flashing, ahead of them parked on the shoulder. The officers were already standing outside their vehicles, waiting.

"Somebody's a rat," said Squid.

The tires grumbled as Q slowed and pulled the car onto the gravel. The trailing car tucked in behind them.

"It's fucking Merv," said Q.

"It's his fucking blow," exclaimed the Squid.

"Driver and passenger, slowly stick both hands out the window," chirped an officer with a megaphone.

When they were both lying face down on the ground, hands cuffed behind their back, Q looked across Julie's rusty undercarriage at the Squid. The Squid met his gaze.

"I shouldn't have come," said the Squid.

"I know. But now we have do the time," said Q.

"I'm no Mickey Mouse."

"I know."

"Then why bring it up."

Q was already thinking ahead, thinking about how he was going to fix this, but to do that he needed Merv out on the streets. And that meant the Squid had to keep his mouth shut.

"You tell them it's all me," said Q.

They lay there on the ground looking at each other underneath the car as they heard the trunk pop open.

An officer whistled, "Well, well, look at this. Somebody got some explaining to do"

"Got it?" asked Q.

The Squid nodded.

After all was said and done, the Squid wiggled out of his precarious situation and ended up only serving two months. Q did a two year stretch in the slammer. And not a day went by he didn't think about Merv the Perv.

* * *

"I want that one," said Lilly tugging on her father's pant leg. She was pointing at the red ball inside the giant gumball like dispenser located near the entrance of the toy store. Meyrick looked at the stack of balls.

"Of course you want the one in the middle," said Meyrick as he began pulling out the bottom balls and tossing them back into the top of the towering vending machine. Slowly the red ball descended down and finally popped out the opening. It rolled into the waiting arms of the little girl.

"Got it," she said picking it up. Meyrick smiled large because his daughter was smiling large.

"Okay kiddo, let's go find your brother. I think he's in the video game section."

"Yippee!" exclaimed Lilly.

* * *

The windows were fogged from the steam coming off the cheeseburgers and fries. Two Seconds made a circle with the forearm of his sleeve to look across the rainy street at the bank.

"Maybe he's late because of the rain?" said Two Seconds.

Q just threw him a look. He took a bite of his burger, chewed it and swallowed.

"It shouldn't make any difference."

"Merv's late," repeated The Squid. He was sitting behind them on a plastic milk crate in the back of the van sucking on a strawberry milkshake.

"He'll be coming," reassured Q.

The three men sat listening to the rain tip-tapping on the roof. A woman walked by the van on the sidewalk wearing a white coat with knee high black boots. She carried a see-through bubble umbrella. Two Seconds looked at her well groomed blonde hair brushed back over her ear, falling down past her shoulders. Her pedigree was money. The whole of the Glebe was money. He watched her expensive ass wiggle as she dashed across the street and disappeared into a health food store. He turned his focus back to the open tinfoil wrapper where his half-eaten burger sat on the dashboard. He looked over at Q who stuffed the remains of his greasy double cheese into his mouth. Two Seconds felt coffee and bile come up into his mouth. He swallowed hard forcing it back down. His palms were sweating under his black racing gloves. He owed Q a solid for helping him out in the joint. And he needed the money. Jazz musicians always needed money.

"There," announced Q giving a nod of his head toward the pudgy man carrying a brief case. "He's got about a hundred grand in that thing. Every two weeks he makes his deposit like clockwork. 11:30 a.m. sharp."

"It's 11:35," said the Squid flatly.

"Maybe he was taking a shit," postulated Q, "Whatever."

"And who's that?" asked Two Seconds pointing to the tall man

"That's the 11:35 train pulling into the station. He is also bringing in his week's cash. It's twenty to thirty thousand," said the Squid.

"How do you know this?" asked Two Seconds.

"I was his head chef for two years," answered the Squid, "Both these assholes run like clockwork. They come in at the same time every week, well Merv the Perv comes in every two, but yeah, same shit every Thursday at 11:30 a.m. Then those two dirt bags go out for lunch," said Squid as he sucked his milkshake until it sputtered out, running dry.

"And look at this shit, here comes the sun," said Q pulling down his rubber Halloween mask over his face.

* * *

"Jack, look, the sun is finally coming out. Why don't you take Lilly out and kick the ball around?"

Jack was fixated on playing Minecraft and didn't respond to his mother's suggestion. Jack knew it wasn't a suggestion; he was being told. Subtly.

"Jack, did you hear me?"

"Yeah, okay, just a sec."

"You've been on that all morning and the sun is finally coming out. You know Lilly, she loves it when you play with her."

"I said okay. Okay?"

"Don't be rude or you'll be off of that thing for a week, got it?" snapped Evelyn.

"Sorry," said Jack, "I'm almost done."

Lilly appeared in the living room holding her new red ball.

"Jack-O, will you play with me?" asked Lilly.

"Yeah, just let me finish this," said Jack twisting his Xbox controller in the air, rapidly hitting buttons with his thumb.

"When?" asked Lilly.

"When I'm done," said Jack still twisting the controller in the air and then put it down on the coffee table, "Which is now."

"Yes!" cried Lilly.

Evelyn smiled at Jack. Jack gave her a wink back.

"Let's go out front, the backyard is muddy," said Jack.

"Your dad's working in the garage," said Evelyn, "I'll call you in when lunch is ready."

* * *

Two Seconds, sweating under his rubber Dracula mask, waited for a pause in the traffic and then pulled a U-ey with the van. He pulled up in front of the bank and threw it into park. He checked his side mirrors while flicking on his hazards. The Squid, dressed as Michael Myers, passed a gun and an empty backpack to Q.

"Ready?" asked Q checking over his gun.

The Squid and Two Seconds both nodded.

"Let's go," said Q opening his door.

Two Second listened to the roll of the van's panel door as the Squid flung it open. Q and the Squid went out their respective doors with backpacks slung on their shoulders, guns in their hands, and rubber masks on their heads. Q slammed his door behind him. The Squid left the panel door open. Two Seconds watched as the Squid held the bank door for Q and then followed him in. Two Seconds' couldn't see them after that; the reflection of the glass doors was too much. He could only see the reflection of the van, see his Bela Lugosi reflection staring back. His heart was a monster pounding on the inside of his ribcage. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. He checked his mirrors again. Traffic was moving slowly in both directions. No sirens. No flashing lights. Everything nice and normal.

Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. Check the mirrors. Check the bank door.

"Come on, come on, let's go," muttered Two Seconds. A couple walked by. They were talking and laughing, drinking take-out coffees. "Keep moving," said Two Seconds to himself. He noticed a woman was pushing a stroller across the street. A tall man with a closed umbrella walked by. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. Like cockroaches at night, everyone comes out after the rain, thought Two Seconds.

The smell of the rubber mask was overwhelming. It was wet with sweat. It ran down his neck, down his back. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. Check the mirrors. There! Flashing lights. Then he heard it, the sirens. He didn't have a lot of options. Wait to get caught or run. Take off on foot and leave them the van was the most logical choice. They would still have a chance if he left them the van. No time now. Cars were moving out of the way. The sirens were blazing. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. Two Seconds was about to bail when he realized it was a fucking ambulance. "What are the odds?" Everyone on the sidewalk had slowed or stopped as the ambulance roared by.

Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.

BANG! A gunshot from inside the bank. Sidewalk people swivelled. The woman across the street crouched over her stroller. Some people froze, others began to run. The door of the bank flew open and the Squid came barrelling out, gun in one hand, backpack clutched in the other. Money was flying out of the bag like confetti spewing from a busted piñata. BANG! BANG! The bank door burst open again and Q came flying out. He was covered in blood. A woman on the street screamed. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. Two Seconds checked the mirrors. It was time to go.

He flicked off the hazards, flicked on his indicator, and put it into drive as the Squid jumped into the van. Q, running, lobbed his bag ahead of himself into the van. His body followed coming to a walloping stop as he shoulder checked the interior wall like a linebacker. The Squid rolled the panel door closed as Two Seconds hit the gas as pulled out into traffic. They heard another siren. This one wasn't an ambulance.

* * *

Lilly threw the ball over her head. She was aiming for Jack-O but the sun was in her eyes and she ended up tossing the ball towards the large cedar hedge in an ungraceful twirl.

"The sun's too fat, Jack-O," said Lilly holding her hand over her eyes. Jack liked that she called him 'Jack-O.' She learned the term 'jack o'lantern' last Halloween when they were carving pumpkins. She had been calling him Jack-O ever since.

"Let's switch spots," suggested Jack retrieving the ball, "That way the sun won't be in your eyes."

"Okay Jack-O," said Lilly who walked towards the end of the driveway.

"Carful by the road," yelled Meyrick over his music from the garage.

"No worries dad," said Jack as he gently kicked the ball towards Lilly. The ball rolled past her and into the road.

"Wait Lilly," said Jack, "Look out and make sure there aren't any cars coming first."

Meyrick and Jack both watched as Lilly came to the edge of the cedar hedge and stopped. She looked left and right and then cautiously stepped out onto the street to retrieve her red ball. She came back smiling. She placed it on the ground and kicked it towards Jack-O.

Meyrick liked the song that was playing and turned up the volume on his docking station before he went back to fixing his bicycle.

* * *

Two Seconds could still see the ambulance ahead of him. It left a wake of cars pulled to the side which had gotten out of its way. Two Seconds stomped on the gas. A small car in front of him was pulling back into traffic. Two Seconds laid on the horn and swerved around him keeping his foot firmly pressed on the gas.

"Keep going," said Q who was looking behind him out the back windows at the flashing lights of a police cruiser three blocks away.

"Oh yeah," said Two Second who knew if he got closer to the ambulance he could surf through traffic right behind it. But then again, so could the cop.

"Is that your blood?" asked the Squid.

"I'm good," answered Q, "Merv might not be feeling so well though."

Two Seconds was flying, his horn blaring as he went through a red light and was now less than a block from the ambulance.

"We switching at Lansdowne?" asked the Squid.

"Don't think that's going to work now. Plan B, ditch at Grasshopper, cut through the park to the other car," said Q keeping his eyes on the police car which was closing fast.

They flew over the Bank Street bridge and were now less than fifty metres behind the ambulance. At the next intersection the ambulance went right and Plan B was straight.

"Ambulance or straight?" Two Seconds barked.

Q looked at the Squid and the Squid said, "Stick with B."

"Straight!" said Q at the last moment.

Two Seconds laid on the horn and blew through another red light. Traffic was light in Ottawa South and they hit all greens moving into Alta Vista. As they crested over the hill past Billings Bridge, Two Seconds knew it was coming two seconds before he caught sight of another cruiser coming towards them.

"Fuck," said the Squid.

"Take Kilborn," said Q.

"Exactly where I'm going," said Two Seconds as he slowed down to take the corner and then accelerated into the turn, the tires squealing. The van roared up Kilborn and was only a minute from Grasshopper Park where they could ditch and make a run to the other car, and then be gone with the money. But Two Seconds could feel it again. A third cruiser was coming towards them along Kilborn. The two cruisers behind them were close..

"Let's hope we can cut through somebody's back yard," said the Squid as Two Seconds turned two blocks before the park.

* * *

Evelyn dipped a spoon into the tomato soup and brought it to her lips as she blew on it. She cautiously sipped it. Perfect. She turned off the stove and went about ladling out bowls for lunch. She flipped the grilled cheese sandwiches one last time to check they were the perfect shade of brown, then flicked off that burner too.

She went to the front window and watched Lilly and Jack. She was proud of him the way he took care of her. And now he would be walking her home from school. Ten might be a little young for a phone, but she wanted him to be able to get a hold of her in case of an emergency. She went back to the kitchen and grabbed the portable and dialed Jack's new number.

Jack felt his thigh vibrate. At first he didn't understand what it was, but quickly remembered it was his new phone.

"Hello," said Jack answering as he gave the ball a hard kick in Lilly's direction.

"Time to come in for lunch," said his mom.

"Okay," said Jack.

"Is that a siren?"

* * *

At the next corner Two Seconds spun the wheel hard to the right and the van's back end swung out like a ballroom dancer, the back tires skipping across the pavement like a stone in little hops. He took his foot of the gas and counter steered back. He was fishtailing, something they didn't have time for. He hit the gas again. That's when he saw it appear from behind the tall cedar hedge two houses up on the right. It bounced once. He hit the brakes. It bounced again. He turned the wheel hard to the left. Q braced gripping the door and the armrest, the Squid held onto the handle on the side of the van. The ball bounced and began to roll. Two Seconds spun the wheel and hit the brakes hard. The van flipped. The little girl chasing after the ball didn't see it coming.

* * *

It was that moment when the red ball bounced into view which came to define Q's life. That red ball would haunt his dreams, appearing in fields of tall grass, or disappearing under a wave. It remained of the periphery of his mind, occasionally coming into view. That red ball. That fucking red ball. Always that.

* * *

The red ball sat tucked in a dark corner of the garage for three months until Evelyn noticed it one night when she was taking out the garbage. She stabbed it with the garden shears, cut it into little pieces and threw them into the trash along with the empty mickeys of vodka.

The trash was collected as it was every Monday morning in Evelyn's neighbourhood. The garbage containing the pieces of the red ball were brought to a landfill where it was all buried deep in the ground.

*

Christian McPherson is the author of seven books, Saving Her, Cube Squared, My Life in Pictures, The Sun Has Forgotten Where I Live, The Cube People (shortlisted for the 2011 ReLit Awards), Poems that swim from my brain like rats leaving a sinking ship, and Six Ways to Sunday (shortlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards). He is married to the beautiful Marty Carr. They have two kids, Molly and Henry. They all live together in Ottawa.

Photo: Judith Gustafsson Michael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-6950284376003861232016-10-30T16:44:00.001-04:002016-10-30T17:22:25.074-04:00Fiction #70: Liz BetzThe Woman's Battalion of Death

I don't know what the other women thought about it all. There is a lot of big talk, the plans in high pitch with the postures of courage, but eventually the troop's ability to follow orders cracked, then broke at the early tinges of dawn. Vacillating, the troops are first persuaded, then suddenly they break stride and turn back with words of doubt and lies about prudent action, they are a miserable lot. My sister and I find it unthinkable, intolerable but the sun creeps further into the sky and no battalion leaves the trench to fight the Germans.

'We're ready to go, why don't they ask us?' her whisper reaches me, but I don't answer. There is a chain of command. There is so many doubters that women should be here at all that I fear to disturb the order. Soon the men will rally and at that time they will have to accept that we are part of the offensive.

The Colonel, the Company Commanders and a few braver soldiers try to persuade the regiment to go over the top. Their strong words fall into the mud, while the slackers, for that's all they are, phrased their arguments as if they are only contributing to the decision, as though their fear isn't rampant.

The morning mist has almost vanished. The artillery fire slackens, the debate continues. The time is now! I want to weep in frustration. Don't you see it, the time is now, we cannot wait. We will fail if we wait.

Pusillanimous conduct on both flanks and my Battalion is not even included in the discussion, I could barely stand it. I pace back and forth, my features more grim, my readiness and that of my women never more evident, but my blood could boil for all they care. The decision is not mine to make, ours the 'tender' battalion is to be kept safe, gentlemen's honor. And yet it is they that seek their mother's aprons.

Minutes roll into hours, the order is given for more artillery fire to bombard the enemy, but there is no sign of decision from my fellow officers. These very men that gave their words of honor to attack; now have faint souls that draw back for fear of death.

The day more than half gone and the men have made no decision. Finally about seventy-five officers, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Ivanov, come to me to enter the ranks of my Battalion for a joint advance. The move is made by a true leader, he knows how we feel, he knows we are ready. And from the ranks of the other squads another three hundred intelligent and gallant soldiers follow. We are now a thousand. Each officer is provided with a rifle, our line is formed. It is arranged so that men and women alternate. My sister has fallen into the line, I've lost sight of her but I have all my soldiers to command and my sister must take her place as one of them. We are ready to advance. In my heart I believe that shame alone would carry the rest of the soldiers over in our defense. They would not let us perish in No Man's Land.

Around me the faces are pure and noble and shone with purpose, my women, I am so proud. And I am proud of my sister, so young but so brave. The offensive has to be launched soon, before the front deteriorates to a state of impasse.

Colonel Ivanov telephones his decision. His gamble, some might think and I find doubt in his face so I stand straighter as if that could tell him that he is right to trust us, that we will fight.

As it became apparent that we are ready, those soldiers who have not joined us break into jeers.

"Woman and officers! They are faking. They'll never go over the top. They don't even know how to use a rifle."

"They'll break and run. Just watch."

How I want to reply, but I would not, could not make the situation worse. I grit my teeth in fury. They have to follow us, they have to. I believe, and yet they have not proved themselves this day.

The signal is given, and more than a few of us made the sign of the cross as we leapt out of the trenches. For the country and for freedom, we move against the machine gun fire, marching steadily against the hail of bullets.

Every step carries death with it. Every mind has the same thought.

Will they follow?

Every breath, though a fleeting instant, seems an eternity. Already there are fallen soldiers, women and men alike, equal in the hail of bullets, and yet no troops come after us. We look back, every now and then, as their heads stuck out from the trenches, only to pop back down. Are they still wondering if we are in earnest? Do they think it is a ruse? Perhaps they are right, how could a mere thousand men and women attack after a two days' bombardment on a front of several versts? It is impossible. And yet the ground under my boots says we are doing it.

Our boots, the same as the boots of our male soldiers bog with mud, slip as we step from the greasy soil wet from rains and blood. Our boots carry us, keep us steady, encase our feet and our forward motion. I dare suggest, our boots were as important as our rifles. Without either we are not soldiers at all but mere fodder for the machine of war. But as more of my battalion fell, thoughts of boots and rifles and training are lost to the realization that we are still alone out here, that the troops in the trench have not joined us, that we had not shamed them into the battle. I cannot describe to you how it feels at that moment. The sensation of being lost, the betrayal that made my veins run icy, that being right made no difference, that we could die this very day froze our minds but it doesn't stop our boots. They keep moving unless a bullet takes one of us down. The fallen seem less dead than we who are upright and moving. Our hearts break but our boots go on.

Dauntless is called for, and dauntless of heart and firm of step, we keep the line unbroken, each of us heartened by the presence of the others. We move into the shadows, further into No Man's Land, and only the fire of explosions reveal our profiles to those of our boys in the trenches. Finally their hearts must have moved. We hear a great commotion in the rear. At last. They are awake at last, and they bound forwards with shouts, numberless bodies climb over the top and in a few moments the front stretches to our left and right to become a swaying mass of soldiers, our regiment, then more of the Corps until almost everyone is on the move.

We swarm forward and overwhelm the first German line, then the second. Our regiment alone captures two thousand prisoners. But there is poison waiting in the second line of trenches. There lie cases of vodka and beer, and the troops throw themselves at it, not seeing it for the enemy's trick that it is. My regiment of women fight to destroy it, but the common man is bent on pouring it down their gullet.

"Are you insane?" I plead. "We must take the third line yet, and then the Ninth Corps will come to relieve us and keep up the drive." Few listen. The precious opportunity pours away, our blow is only a tap and not the beginning of a general offensive.

But the men succumb to the bottle. And there are wounded to care for. Many of my women were killed outright, many were wounded. But they are stoic. I can see now, my sister, lying in a pool of blood. I run to her and seek to aid her, but it is too late. Blood pours from her wounds from bullets and shrapnel while she smiles faintly her last smile.

Just before she dies, she tells me,

"My dear, it's nothing."

And perhaps she is right. No one will know of the Woman's Battalion of Death, the most defining moment of my life will be ignored and forgotten, another page of history too raw to be written fully. Already it feels as though it never happened. But I will remember.

*

Liz Betz enjoys her retirement pastime of writing short stories. She has been widely published in journals both online and in print. The 'Woman's Battalion of Death' is a fictionalized version of a battle report published in an anthology of women writers of WW1. Michael Brysonhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-53250377120742661942016-10-30T16:34:00.001-04:002016-10-30T16:35:15.730-04:00Fiction #70: Jayne CollinsYour Messiah

The snow spun down in sporadic sprays, and if the wind was howling, making it blow zigzags across the sky then I didn't know it. I was bundled in my coat with some slow piano nonsense blasting me home, incongruous with the charging train in my head and the way I was seeing the snow. I wanted to turn off all the noise but it was too damn cold. I got distracted by it all and too late noticed it was slippery and I had walked past my place. Less and less cars were passing and more and more trains were chugging between my ears. There was the sound of someone dropping a large pumpkin onto a grand piano and I kept walking, too distracted by the way the snow and the train and the piano in my ears were grating against each other to be jarred by the now crushed-by-a-pumpkin piano. But the sound hit me a couple of blocks later when my slow piano came to a halt, and when I turned around to look for what house it may have come from I slipped and landed in a snow bank. I looked into the white light that poured down on me and thought about how stupid people were who thought they were seeing heaven when clearly any dream state or conk on the head could conjure up such a thing pretty damn quick. I laughed to myself. It wasn't funny enough for me to laugh out loud because I never did laugh out loud unless other people were around because I didn't want to seem rude like I didn't think the things they were saying were funny because I usually did but my laughter hid inside that's all.

A white van drove up beside me then, the reflection of its white lights on the white snow making my eyes feel hammered inward, and they left the damn lights on while they got out of the car and tried to help me. Your lights I kept saying, your lights, as they grabbed under my arms and got me to my feet but then one of them fell on top of me in the process and by this time I was shouting and he was pretending not to hear me. He got me up again with the help of his sidekick, who he had in fact given a swift kick in the side to on his way down to landing on me, flailing his legs like an upside down can-can dancer. They seemed to know me but I didn't know them and they turned off their lights for me finally and let me sit inside the car to get warm. They gave me a sandwich and a drink and asked questions that seemed irrelevant like how was my day, how was I doing, was I cold, where did I live, and that sort of nonsense. I laughed to myself at their bumbling madness, their scripted singsong call and answer, making assumptions when I didn't, couldn't, answer right away because my head wasn't where they wanted it to be. Ketchup mustard and mayonnaise, that's what I was thinking. About drinking a bottle of ketchup, mixing it with mustard and then chasing both with mayonnaise and maybe that should be considered a well-balanced liquid diet. Maybe that should be my best effort at creating the abstract masterpiece of pumpkin falling on white grand piano in my mouth and then more ketchup for the blood on the hands of the little twerp that did it, that ruined another priceless piece of shit, that got whipped like a murderer behind the old barn and fell face first onto shards of glass that had been smashed by her mother when found by her father, cursing and crying as he made her do it, watching over her and making her throw every bottle against the barn and the rain came down loud and sparkly while granny pounded Beethoven on the white grand piano that wasn't dead yet and I looked out the window and cried.

I looked out the window of the white van and cried but I didn't even feel like I was in a van until it started moving and I hadn't asked to go anywhere. I wanted to ask where we were going but the radio was on and I could still feel wet on my cheeks but I didn't know if I was still crying or if it was snow from outside or wet from my hair from the snow or, and I didn't really care except that I tried to imagine the wet I felt drowning the train in my head. Like maybe it was just a little mechanical train doing all that damage, ripping up the roads in my brain that were not meant for trains, and that the wet could put a stop to if there was enough and it hit the right wires to short circuit, but how did I know it wouldn't blow up anything else in the process? The car seat felt like a big black towel so I fought off my clothes and rolled myself around in it to get off all the wet so I wouldn't blow my head off. The two guys were screaming in the front and I thought they knew so I started screaming too until I knew I wasn't wet anymore and I put back on my clothes and everyone stopped screaming. I asked to be dropped off and they asked why, and I said because I wanted to leave now because I was dry, but they said it was too cold and I didn't think they got to decide how cold it was for me. They locked the doors then and got too quiet and I told them to go phone the police on themselves, to call in a 4024 on their own stupid heads. They drove faster and I thought the next thing I was going to see was water under me while we crashed into an ocean or a lake or a pond or a swamp or a bog or a river or a puddle. I wanted no water below me, no last look of black death swallowing me whole like the way that priest said my parents went downdowndown to a watery grave. I wanted soil in my grave, dry, hard, compact, even a little bit sandy kind of soil like from a desert please but not one where there has been oil discovered because you never know when that could spout up out of nowhere and then people will want to set it on fire so no one will die from wanting it so bad.

The van stopped. I called out 911 a bunch of times hoping my voice would find its way to a phone that knew what I wanted. The van started and stopped again and I think it was dead but I hadn't heard any pumpkins falling on its white roof, but I wasn't really listening, I was too busy yelling 911 so maybe I missed it, but maybe I did it while I was yelling and I didn't even know. These snot-fucker guys got out of the car and opened my door and three other snot-fucker guys came down and helped them bring me inside through a white door to some white walls and I thought this place was a new dimension waiting for someone to throw up all over it and make it real. I threw up all over it and made it real and I felt better and they swooped in and fluttered around me like seagulls and I hate seagulls even though I like birds, but seagulls were more like hawks than birds and hawks were not really birds because they were hawks. They gave me some small white circles to eat and I threw them down and told them Any Other Colour! Any Other Colour! so they gave me blue. I put the blue in my ears to stop their seagulling and then there was a stabbing with one of their seagull beaks and I don't remember anything else except I woke up with all you swine staring at me and asking me dumb shit questions like how did I get here and why did I wake you up, when you're the ones who woke me up and I remember now what comes next. I remember what happens after the little girl gets whipped like a murderer behind the old barn and falls face first onto shards of glass that had been smashed by her mother when found by her father. She wakes up here. She wakes up here.

The cot creaks like the old rusty door of an abandoned house when I try to get off it, even though it's shlumpy sunked in the middle and trying to eat me for breakfast. I gotta piss but I don't know where the can is so I start jumping on the cot asking where is the can but no one is listening, like they don't even know who the hell I am. I'm like Your Messiah kids! Here to heave you out of this sorry white oblivion – but that last part doesn't come out. Just as the "I" in Mess"I"ah, the loudest bugle of my proclamation hurtles out, the springs snap, all weak like chicken bones under my feet, and I fall through and my toes touch the ground but all caught in the sheet and I slip and slide back and the cot snaps shut on me like a mouse trap. I feel my warm piss stream down my leg and I don't even try to hold it in and I don't mind the weight of the cot on top of me for a while. But then my head starts to hurt like someone's trying to saw it open and I have to push the cot I'm caught in away, but it's heavy so I try to wriggle out instead and I wonder if this is what being born feels like but I don't remember my birth except maybe I do and that is why I wonder because inside somewhere I know. I free one arm and reach up and feel no more hair just metal lines on my head like a row of ants colonizing my skull. When I look at my hand it's all red like they bit me but it doesn't look like blood so I lick my fingers and it is blood. Then I hear sawing sounds and I start pushing you swine around trying to find the saw, find out who's trying to saw my head open, and I see two giants that are dressed like the snot-fuckers and they're strong and grab my arms and tie them behind my back while the blood from my head drips into my eyes and down my face and it feels like I'm crying again but I'm not. They cover my face with a white cloth like I'm dead but I can still say Any Other Colour! Any Other Colour! but this time they don't give me blue. They wipe my face with the white cloth to make it red then they put it on my head like to replace my hair. I start to wonder what they did with my hair and if it's going to come back to me once these ants get the fuck out of my skull. I hope my hair is all together like in a big happy clump all fluffy like and not scattered about willy-nilly. It would be cruel to separate them after the trauma of being expelled from their home.

I start to feel very sleepy so I let the snot-fucker-giants do whatever they want with me, which is putting me on a rolling bed and hurling me down a hallway. If I was allowed to do whatever I wanted with someone I would put them on a rolling bed and hurl them down a hallway too so I don't blame them but I'm too sleepy for human bowling ball to be fun, it just makes me feel like throwing up again against more whirring white walls and I brace myself for when I'm going to knock down all the bowling pins, and then the sawing sound comes back again but I think I'm dreaming now because things aren't white anymore.

I know when I'm awake again because there's white. My head feels like a balloon and I wonder if the ants are having a birthday party in it. My eyes are open but I don't feel like I have a body anymore except I can see some of it so I know it's there. I try to feel around and see if my head is a balloon, if the ants have expanded their empire and there are kingdoms in my chest, but my arms are stuck and I get tired trying to lift them. The white goes away for a while. But the sawing. I need to tell someone to get it to stop but my mouth won't open and they're all snot-fuckers anyway and I don't want to give them any clues as to where I am in case they have the saw.

So I board the train in my brain that the ants have invaded and the saw is chasing down, chugga grate, chugga grate, chugga chugga grate grate. I don't want a train, I want a teleport so I don't have to see anything I don't recognize along the way. No trains that snatch little girls off farms when everything is dead and they only hear echoes of words from before that make them think there are still people but the train says no. The train takes them away where other people pretend to be their parents but give them pats on the back that rattle their lungs and split their spine in two so now they're cracked, all cracked up. There were train tracks around the whole world and I just kept circling it up and down and seeing everything different and the same and being quiet and loud and the rumble made my heart hurt and my head pound and the heaving wail of the whistle was the same sound I made when granny turned grey and stopped making the noise herself. All the time I made that noise, her noise, until the slap that swept me out the door after my mothers nails gripped the back of my neck because we were all sad and not just me and I wasn't being fair. The train went too fast and I knew we would crash into the barn even though I didn't know where I was.

I open my eyes to white again and all the snot-fuckers have turned into pretty ladies, trying to trick me into letting them saw me open so they can steal everything. But their eyes are the same so I can tell what's what. They have nicer voices and gentler hands but they ask me about my head right away, like I've given them permission to dig right into it, but then two of them stand over me and talk about staples instead of stitches and they are doing their best and I am going to be fine but of course they would say that if they're the ones getting away with sawing me open. I want to get up so bad but they won't let me. I need to stop falling asleep so I can get the straps off my hands and run away from the sawing but I can't feel the train in my brain anymore and I wonder if they've already stolen it.

There is an Indian woman in the bed next to me whose face I can't see. She spouts You Can Do It, You Can Do It like a broken record, except with her accent it sounds like You, Conduit, and then, Yukon-twit. And the white of the Yukon is back, all around me in this place, and I wait for the polar bears here, the glaciers, icebergs, criminal cold. Where the train that snatched little girls off farms ended up, where pretend parents waited with heavy coats for heavy hurts, where the train stopped and everything else began. I saw polar bears everywhere but shot into nothing, the cold white nothing of nothing. The Yukon keeps me up at night.

They must've conked me on the head again because I wake up to a different white with different ladies and I don't care that I can't move my arms or legs. I can feel my head isn't a balloon anymore and the train is back but going slower now, away from the polar bear fear. A sad looking lady comes over and says some things about medication and calming me down and she looks so sad about it all that I smile and try to say it's all going to be okay so she'll feel better. I even try to laugh out loud but I only make the quacks of a drowning duck. I feel slobber dribble down my chin and I try to wipe it in my shoulder like I'm some handicapped imbecile not that handicapped people are imbeciles but I am both handicapped and an imbecile in this moment of drooly blubbering. I don't want the lady to get more sad because of how I'm not able to wipe my own mouth, so I try to slurp it up with my tongue instead but then the residual wetness feels cold and ticklish on my skin and makes me itchy so I'm back to rubbing my face against my shoulder in no time, which makes the lady's brow crease like an accordion. I think she might cry but instead she undoes my arms and legs and I am free. I want to scratch my face and jump up and down and throw my arms around her and shake her like a can of paint except I've gotten heavy. They must have filled me with polar bear heads so I couldn't go anywhere. I try to go anywhere anyway and don't do so good. I forget how to walk for a while and think they've ripped my legs off and put rubber hoses there instead. And all of a sudden I remember the sawing and it takes me three and a half days to get my hand to my head and feel that the ants are gone, but there are grooves where they dug in and burrowed through to my skull. I have some tiny hairs back but nothing like before.

I lie down on the cold floor and try to scratch through the tile to get to the ants. I don't know if I should thank them for leaving or give them a stern talking to for coming in the first place. But I want to see them. I want to see them and tell them I know what they did.

*

Jayne Collins is a writer who lives in Toronto.

(Photo by Tee Schneider.)Michael Brysonhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-73004327000759290812016-09-13T22:21:00.000-04:002016-09-13T22:21:07.867-04:00Fiction #69New fiction! Issue #69

Posy by Lara Stokes

Lineage by J.C. Maxwell

On a Tuesday by Jennifer Ouellette

Masks by Chad Inglis

The Meeting by Susan Grundy

Names by Terence M. Green

Submissions now open for #70

Special thanks to all who have been submitting. Enjoy. Michael Brysonhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2564733539116511601.post-13153182208590230232016-09-13T22:10:00.001-04:002016-09-13T22:14:22.875-04:00Fiction #69: Lara StokesPosy

The lady says, "Son, is the manager here? Someone I can talk to?"

Robbie sighs, goes to the back, makes a show of it, yells "Dammit, Carl!" and returns resigned, poised.

"There are absolutely no peonies for you. Not one. The manager said so."

"Well can you order some?"

She was in once before, 'just browsing.'

"They are out of season. They'll be very expensive."

"Fine," she says, "I'll take two."

"Dozen?"

"Flowers," she snaps, her voice nasal and gritty.

"Two flowers?" He has a wedding to prep.

"A pink and a red one."

"You want me to order two single flowers for you?"

"The customer is always right." She has a displeased mouth, a beakish nose. She has a birdlike quality he can't quite name.

"You're right." He smiles perhaps too widely.

"I don't like to be sassed, son. I'd like to speak to whoever's in charge here."

"I'm the owner," he says. She squints at him, head tilted. A cockatoo, he thinks, that's it.

"You're a child."

"I am not."

"You can't be more than seventeen."

"Well, I am. I'm twenty-six. I own this store. It's called Robbie's Flowers. I am Robbie." He pauses, then, "I am not going to order two single peonies, of two different colors, no less, because it is the middle of December, I don't like you, and I don't want to."

She is stunned. Her eyebrows stand haughtily, like sharp painted feathers.

"Well! You can expect a very unhappy review from me on the Yelp, young man!" She is positively molting. She flutters off, a trail of rage behind her. Robbie smiles, then returns to the back to unpack the rest of the peonies.

He has a rule, you see, a purpose. He sells for the deserving. For a reason: to spread beauty. There is such a thirst for beauty in the world. He will not sell flowers to prissy cockatoo bitches. He will not sell to men who want to pay in cash and leave their work numbers, or worse, ask to have the flowers delivered to a hotel room. Flowers must be a pure gesture. A comfort. An offering. A declaration. Flowers are a privilege. They are very powerful, each with their own meaning. He likes to send messages with them, almost enjoying the fact that the recipients are ignorant of them.

Most importantly, Robbie doesn't sell flowers to that guy, the one with the plastic glasses, and plaid shirts and the Blundstones. He does not sell flowers to this man and this man does not buy flowers from Robbie. He buys them at the fruit market across the street, where hornets buzz over melting raspberries and sweaty mangoes. These are the vermin who deign to pollenate the daisies, dyed hot pink, or on rare occasion some half decent cut tulips. He buys this garbage, lingers, sniffs the mangoes, decides that yes, this crappy bouquet of mixed chrysanthemums is the perfect way to express his lust, pays, then turns, faces Robbie's window, smiles, waves, raises his flowers in triumph, and walks around the corner to the little white house. He doesn't know chrysanthemums mean friendship.

This is who Moira is fucking.

*

Moira hates chrysanthemums, anything dyed. Anything that smells like grass, not flowers. She is very specific about her flower smells. She used to be, anyways. Perhaps her palate has become less discerning overall. Robbie knows what she likes. He used to make her gorgeous, delicate floral confections – white crepe roses (innocence), sprigs of honeysuckle (happiness), blue hyacinth (constancy), a single languid calla lily (beauty). A bunch of purple lilacs (first love). Each tied with a twine bow, a tiny scroll attached, tiny poems scribbled onto floral wrapping paper –

Your mouth watches me
and under its gaze
I am melting…

These tapered off. It happens.

"We've grown apart," Moira said on the phone to her sister, three months ago. He was coming up the stairs, lightly, as he did, and paused. She hadn't locked the door, and it had crept open.

"We want different things," she said but Robbie knew it was really because she wanted an idiot in Blundstones to play out all of her lumberjack fantasies.

"He's so sweet, Jenny, you know that. But – and I know I'm such a bitch for saying this – Robbie…he's just… weak." He'd flinched as he heard his name.

"Like, not just emotionally. Like, physically. I need a man to throw me down." Oh she'd been thrown down. "Like, physically, I just feel… big. I feel like I will break him. Our hands are the same size." His breath, oddly, had slowed to almost nothing. "I swear I love him. If I ever loved him." Jesus. "I just – it was never a forever thing. And I just really need to work on me, you know. Work on being alone." A pause, then, giggling, a hushed "Yes, I totally did." Pause. "So hot. SO HOT. I'm so bad, right? It was like doing Wolverine, like, before he got scary." He let himself slump onto the landing floor and sat there for a while, thinking hard. He waited for "Jenny, I've got to go!" then stood up, and pushed the door open.

"Hey babe." She smiled, all innocence, all sweetness.

He said nothing, just crossed the room until he stood in front of her on the sofa. He took off her glasses as she looked up at him, smiling, surprised as he dropped to his knees, slid his hands roughly up her skirt and pulled off her underwear.

"Well hello there." Her voice was low, coy. He flipped her around, This is for saying I'm just a florist and this is for all the rent you owe me and this and this and this is for that awful 'If'. This, because you loved me and you know it. He imagined her gasps, 'Yes', as apology. After, when his rage had melted some, when she was spent and smiling in his arms he removed himself.

"That… you…" She reached for him, pulled him towards her. He stepped back, picked up her skirt from the floor and wiped himself. She opened her mouth in protest and he cut her off -

"I really need to work on being alone now. You need to move out." He walked away to shower.

He remembers Moira sleeping, curled fetal, her back to the outside of the bed, trusting the safety of the room. Towards the end she opened, bloomed across the whole bed, limbs like vines easing him out of her way. She used to love his softness. He used to hold her face in his hands and this was her favorite thing, she felt so safe like this. His fingers used to creep around the curve of her naked hip, inquisitive and spidery. He used to sit on the edge of the tub, playing Bright Eyes on his guitar while she bathed. Now she needed a goddamned lumberjack.

*

The cockatoo is standing in the doorway. Yellow silk scarf fluttering around her throat, comically, feathers flared as if she knows how much he has dreaded her. She marches in tight quick steps.

"I've been to every flower store on the Danforth."

"Okay."

"All of them. Eight of them."

"There are ten."

"I stopped at Woodbine."

"Well there you go."

"I have been to eight flower shops and they have all had peonies in stock. In a variety of colors."

"How lucky for you."

"I know you have them."

"Well."

"Well indeed, Mister!"

"Have is a subjective term."

"Are there peonies for sale in this establishment?"

"Not for you."

"Do you care about your business at all?" "I'm covered, thanks." "Covered?"

"I have an exclusive contract with some pretty big wedding studios, so I'm pretty set. Walk-in demands are just not a priority."

"I made a review for you on the –"

"Oh, I saw. You comma-splice a lot."

"I just. Want. Flowers." She takes a deep breath. "Please."

"There's nine other places."

"I want them here. I want you to sell them to me. I want what I want." For a moment she falters, exhausted. Her feathers fall. "I just need two. A pink and a red."

It is in this moment that Moira's conquest walks in, all eight feet of him. He smiles pleasantly when Robbie catches his eye, and stands behind the lady patiently.

Robbie pauses. He glances back at the lady and again at the dude, who is now picking up the miniature potted ferns that Robbie split just yesterday, scrap metal pots of different sizes, hammered by hand into intricate Aztec designs. He is checking their prices, each one, and setting them back down haphazardly. He is screwing with Robbie's specific arrangement.

"Those aren't for sale," Robbie calls out, and the dude looks up, examines the one in his hand very closely, then matches Robbie's gaze and sets it down, out of order.

"Says $14.99," he says.

"It's a mistake." Robbie holds up a hand to the woman. "Hold on." He crosses the room and grabs the pots, his arms full and his face full of ferns. One slips from his grip, and the dude reaches for it before it is lost. He settles it back on the crook of Robbie's arm, and steps back.

"Don't help me." Robbie drops the pots on the back counter and begins peeling the price tags off.

"Hello! My flowers!" chirps the cockatoo. Robbie looks back to the woman, who blinks, says nothing, but stands still, watching him.

Robbie turns and makes for the back room, where he quickly pulls out a pink peony and a red one, lays them on an elaborate bed of greenery and baby's breath. He adds a glittery twig, six layers of gauzy white tissue and a layer of paper thin burlap, tied it up in the polka dot cellophane with a flourish of pink velvet ribbon. He quickly hands it to the lady who looks at him, wide eyes now full of tears. "Oh," she says softly. "These are very fine." She reaches for her purse. He remembers now - compassion.

"No," he says "They are a gift. Now go away."

She nods blankly, turns to leave and then back to him, saying gently, "My sister loved your shop." Robbie nods awkwardly, ashamed, gestures for the door, and rather suddenly, it feels, he is alone with this intruder.

"Hello," says the dude.

"Why are you here?" Something about that last flourish has strengthened him.

"Flowers."

"No shit."

"Excuse me?"

"I know who you are."

"Ok," The dude smiles so easily it's unnerving. "So you know what I want."

"I do not."

"I need one of those… things. The things you make."

"Bouquets."

"The thing with the lavender and the poppy and whatever." Robbie stares at him. "For Moira."

"Wow." Robbie's laugh comes hard and fast, like a sneeze. "You've got some balls." He stares at him.

"What's your name, man?"

"Ridge."

"Ha!"

"What?"

"That's a dumb name."

"Yeah, well… I know." He looks at Robbie. "She doesn't like the ones I get."

"Yeah, I know."

"I mean, most chicks are happy to get flowers, right?"

"Not ugly ones."

"Chicks?"

"Flowers."

"Well, whatever. She says my flowers smell like grass. So, I mean, you sell that stuff she likes, right?"

"No."

"You don't sell flowers?"

"What I made… those were… specific…"

"But you can make one."

"Not for you."

"You'll need to get used to me, Robbie."

"Not really."

"I'm gonna be around."

"There are nine other flower shops on the Danforth."

"She likes the ones here."

"That's her problem." (Moira's lemongrass bath oil, slippery, sweet footprints leading to the bed.)

"Go away." It is getting dark out. Robbie turns back to the pots on the counter, lines them up neatly.

"It's a fucking flower shop, man, sell me some flowers."

(Moira tenderly removing the twine, silently breathing it all in deeply, Moira taking each vase down from the shelf, every time, to find the perfect one.)

(Moira curled fetal again on her side of the bed, weeping, trembling, and finally, sitting up slowly and emptying her drawers into garbage bags.) He feels heavy and done.

"Why." He asks quietly. "Why should I do this?"

"I want to make her happy." On closer inspection, Robbie sees the razor burn on Ridge's neck, badly hidden with a band-aid.

(Moira squealing in the bathtub, clapping as he strums from the doorway, laughing when she knocks over her wine, licking it as it runs down her arms.)

He turns and moves to the back. He lays out a sheet of thin blue paper, handmade with flecks of silver. He looks around, thinking, pulls out some hydrangea (heartlessness). He adds in geranium (folly), the sharp scent stinging up at him, marigold (grief), an obnoxious yellow lily (hatred). Why not. He weaves her a message; all of his hurt, his blame, all the love he has left. (Moira blinking sleepily at him from her pillow, her gold eyes lit up with sunlight.) He pulls some strands of cyclamen from a pot and winds them around the other stems, wrapping them as firmly as he means it. Farewell. He seals it well, plugs the long stems in water tubes. It looks garish, disjointed. He wants to get it all out. He will only do this once. He wants this to hurt her. He wants it to last.

He returns to the front. Ridge looks up, anxiously, it seems. Robbie hands over the flowers, and a small card.

"This is a one time thing. There's a woman down the street who does really nice arrangements. Here's her number."

"Thanks, man." Ridge looks surprised. He slips the card into his back pocket.

"Please don't come here again." Robbie reaches out to move a wayward bit of grass in the bouquet, then changes his mind. "It's not cool."

"Ok." Ridge reaches for his wallet. "What do I owe you?"

"Nothing."

"No way," he says, "I'm not taking anything from you."

"Just deliver the message." Robbie looks hard at him.

"Uh. Well," Ridge pauses, confused. "Look, man. I'm sorry. It just happened."

"I'm over it." Robbie swallows hard. "I'm closing now."

"Ok. Thank you." Ridge turns to leave, stops, and says quietly "I'm not a bad guy, you know." He looks at Robbie, shrugs, and leaves, the bell ringing softly behind him.

Robbie follows quickly behind, locks the door and flips the door sign to Closed. He returns to the counter and picks up his price gun, quickly stamps the metal pots and carries them back to their table and arranges them carefully before turning off the lights.

*

Lara Stokes is the nerd behind 'Across the Bar', a blog of love letters to dead writers (acrossthebarletters.com). Her plays have appeared in the Toronto Fringe Festival and Paprika Festival, with a new play presently in development with The Steady State Theatre Project. She has been published in The Ottawa Arts Review, BlueTyger Magazine, and Burnt Toast: Newsletter of the Writer's Union of Canada. Lara writes and teaches in Toronto, but she is a small town Northern Ontario gal at heart.

The photo is by Liz Lott.  Michael Brysonhttp://email@example.com