BEELINES IN WINTER

This is a long one. Not a litbit at all but a litlot. I wrote it in four parts. Just recorded it, it’s early and I’m a little nasal-y, sorry, also it’s 18 minutes long and imperfect.

According to what I wrote this morning and my very full head it’s going to get even longer. Oh man. I think this might be Chapter One. Uh-oh. Not sure I’m ready for this but here goes.

Some of you have been asking whether I see your comments. Yes! I see! I think you have to have a google account in order to get notifications of my response, if you comment as a guest you’re on your own I think, sorry, the only way to see other comments (and mine) is to check back now and then (you can click the pink text above to get to the main page where most of the previous stories are available). Many of you send emails instead of commenting which is fine, it’s great, but it’s also nice for others to see what you have to say.

And if you are inclined to comment I have a question. Are you interested in reading this novel chapter by chapter on a weekly basis, or do you prefer little independent stories?

I’m going to tuck myself back into Chapter Two now, I am disappearing into fiction, I ‘m on the bus, the windows are so salty it feels like there’s nothing out there, there are a few of the letters in the pages of my beekeeping book.

Thanks for being here.

BEELINES IN WINTER by Sherry Cassells

The Angst

My hands were so winter dry yesterday I used lotion, I worked it in as I looked through the kitchen window into my reflection layered as it was with the darkening woods, I reminded myself of my mother as I saw her when I was young, when I did my homework at the kitchen table, but it came to me all of a sudden that my own slippery hands were not an accurate representation of hers, she hadn’t been applying lotion, she'd been wringing her hands, her expressionless face pointed through her own reflection, her soul performing an Edvard Munch scream.

This revelation was the second most powerful of my life – the first then needs to be told – I used to think we lived on the inside of the earth. The dawning of the truth left me sleepless in childhood but not the solid insomnia of last night upon the discovery of my mother's hidden angst.

My father was a beekeeper, he’d grown up gifted on this same land, able to read a beeline without being taught, he said the bees had been in him since birth and I tried to get a bee of my own, I lay in bed every morning and listened, manifested, sometimes the wind would catch my ear and I’d think finally until I turned my head to the truth, but today for the first time I am certain of the inner presence of a bee. I am not sure where it is. It extends in brief spasms to my fingers and toes, when I rub my hands together it, she – her presence is feminine – she stills. It is only 4am, dark dark dark, I blow gently at the kitchen window and she comes up my throat into my mouth, my lips narrow like birth and she leaves me, there she goes, unhindered by glass, unbothered by winter, the bee goes straight.

The way I follow her is the same as the act of threading a needle, but unimaginably larger, it involves the whole world.

I crumple tissue up my sleeve, I like a clean kitchen before bed, when a button comes off I tend to it immediately, things like that, things I thought were my mother’s idiosyncrasies are now normal, my lined-up boots at the door each contain a wool sock, my coat is in its place, shoulders back chest out, my hat and gloves there there there. I follow the bee through the woods. I wonder why I did not do this before, why I did not make this beeline as a child playing hide and seek, why did I not come this way to kiss my cowboys and my lumberjacks, but it comes to me clear as our placement on the world that there are other means of protection, this cold morning I feel my father, his arm opens the snowy fronds, he says in branches and wind, look Kate look.

This is not a fairy tale but the dilapidated heap of a former bee kingdom, I know my way around, the bee has returned to my gut, I take a single drawer and go back in my tracks to the house where I put it on the kitchen table and study its architecture, there is a sweetness as the wood warms, I bite, I taste, I spit, my father was a carpenter by trade, I know these bones are the cypress he preferred, the same wood he ordered for the sheep house, he would never call it a barn, he saved a lick for the centre of the slide he made for me, see where it still stands, and look, the sheep house also remains in perfect condition, my three sheep on one side, my workshop on the windowless other.

Curious sheep nearly collapse me, I stand on stacked crates, they nose the backs of my knees, I buckle and stand and buckle and stand, I reach for a box and in that box is A Gentlewoman’s Guide to Beekeeping, that’s when the second bee kicks in, a third circles my head like a crown, I allow one sheep into the house with me, they know whose turn it is, she stands in front of my evening chair, I place one bare foot and then the other upon her back, she moves closer so my knees bend at her spine, she purrs, she waits for the tic tic tic of knitting needles which my sheep adore but I open the book and start reading, she shuffles, my three bees take a warm turn, in the morning there are four.

I am not young yet I am capable of this sort of pregnancy, the things I read in the book I realize at each sentence I already know, it has come late to me this intuition, unlike my father who was born with it mine has been incubating, discovered by chance because of a visit into my childhood, my mother through her screaming reflection had her eye on the beekeeper – or did she?

The Elsewhere

The next morning I took my shake-leg sheep back to her triangle.

It had come to me in the night, between drifts of sleep, that my mother had not been looking at the beekeeper at all, but at the elsewhere.

I think we know our crackling moments of change as they occur and that was one of mine. When I understood that my mother's angst was yearning and that her yearning was for elsewhere, I experienced one of the most fundamental changes of my life.

Because my mother's elsewhere was, mine is.

Suddenly it popped like a hole in my head, infinitesimal, vulnerable, it shook and nearly disappeared yet it was enough to throw my equilibrium, and as if my sheep nosed the backs of my knees again, I teetered.

The majority of these opportunities for change we ignore, our bodies know to heal them immediately, completely, that is the danger, but my purposeful bee went right to it, she crossed my heart as she beelined to the small open window at my temple, I believe she was trying to prevent my hurtling white blood cells from tending it.

I left her to her work. 

There is plenty of time to allow nothing on a farm in the winter and that’s what I did, I baked charcoal crackers for the sheep, I spun their grey wool, and after mixing dollops of leftover paint, I covered a single kitchen wall in the resulting grey. That night brushing my teeth in front of the mirror, my sheep waiting her turn at my evening chair, I noticed that my darker left eye was the grey of the wet paint, my more powdery right, the grey of the dry.

Our different eye colour was a whim of genetics my parents and I shared, there’s a black and white photograph in which we are pressing our three heads together, I am in the centre, the dot of our dash dot dash mouths. Our eyes are open wide wide wide. My father's left eye is the darkest, and in perfect increments we end up at the palest eye, my mother’s right, the very one I am now able to see elsewhere through, just as I see the newly revealed beeline through my father’s darkest.

There is so much to do about this that I do the only thing available and that which I believe to be the most vital. I do nothing.

The Nothing 

I walk in curves through the white forest, the snow heaps on the netted branches lowering them in an elegant way, they curtsy and bow, no sound but the private friction of my head in my hood, this is the nothing.

How can emptiness take up space I don’t know but it moves in, I think it’s my mother’s, it enters my blood stream and renders my machine inefficient, I feel a vital absence like organ theft, I frisk myself, count my blue toes in the shower.

When I returned the sheep to its triangle I walked into the windowless workshop so stuffed with grey, the Morse code photograph came to mind and I had an idea about it, I wanted to look at it, not in benign adoration but to see if I'm right.

I walk my fingers through the contents of cookie tins no no no, I flip through photo albums no no no, frayed stacks I deal like cards no no no. In my parents’ untouched bedroom I swirl my mother’s lavender scented things, move my father’s goods like chess pieces, I find a wrinkled card with a watercolour oval and when I open it there stands my young signature, KATE, tall and skinny like me, not a curve in sight, HAPPY ETHER MOM & DAD printed like a fence, but I do not find what I am looking for.

Our house has no established front or back, there is a forest side and a road side, the road ends here. In winter the school bus didn’t come, I had to walk to Maynard’s corner where we, a grubby hatch of snotty stragglers, were picked up. The bus driver taught fiddle every Wednesday, we sang all the way to school. I can beeline where the songs are stored in my brain, even now they jostle out of my mouth, I cannot shower without them, dosey-doe your towel. He used to miss the turn sometimes and we’d sail along the shores of Lake Superior, we felt like gods, we sang our hearts out, when it was my turn to play, holding the fiddle was like handling a lamb, clumsy at first both of us, the lamb soon quieted and the fiddle bleated.

I waited for the beekeeper to come in every night, my father who zigzagged the forest with a lantern, through the tall straight birch glowing, I went to the porch in my nightgown, cupped my hands and sang good night, dosey-doe, he never shouted back so stealthy was his work, but my heart lighted at the tilt of his beefull head, his duelling eyes, I knew, adored me. 

While my mother flicked her blue dress and sang Que Sera Sera, her secret signal of distress while I thought the charming lyrics were for me, like Doris Day's were for her child, but she was deceiving us, hiding her misery, she was the captive one.

You can see the lake from the hill on the other side of the road that isn’t there, and even when there’s weather or darkness I can see it between the treetops, there's a slide show in my forehead, there’s a rock shelf to the west and so a gap in the treeline where the waves slide a full greyscale, was it Queen Mary, Bloody Mary, who said on her deathbed open my heart and you'll find England.

Open mine and you’ll see the lake through the treetops.

My mother the mistress of decoy used to say if you are looking for something and can't find it, try looking for something else.

So I sang Que Sera Sera, I cannot wear a dress but flick my jeans, there’s a button missing from my tweed coat, my mother’s tweed coat, it’s a shade of teal like what puddles in the springtime between the treetops, so I half search for it, not instead, not in earnest, but in addition to the dash-dot-dash photograph. I do not look in viable places, I search corners not curves but wouldn’t you know I find it, the button, when I pick it up there’s the photo, there's the circle of my face in the drawer beneath the teal – I don’t know what happened to the button I never saw it again – with the photograph I dosey-doe to the stove and beneath the strong white light I look to see if my dot mouth and my wide eyes mean what I think they mean, and they do, I am trying with all my might to be a bee.

The Wonderful

It is asking too much, you are already extended, so I will not say a bee rides each shoulder, this is not a fairy tale, but the mechanics of them, my shoulders, as well as my hips knees ankles are different, every day something feels better, my stolen organs one after the other were only borrowed for repair, my ten toes are pink, the netting of my fascia fine-tuned, balance allowed, trauma – we all contain trauma – reduced. I have lost count of my internal bees, I believe they are to me what the animated bluebirds were to Cinderella, my peaceful accomplices, I do not now think there is a tug of war between hive and elsewhere but a tension indeed exists, and this tension is new to me, it is the wonderful.

That with which I gain a beeline to courage.

I dismantled the bee kingdom and piece by piece in my workshop I rebuilt it without disturbing the ancient combs of its fascia, I dismantled my old slide and arranged the cypress into new bones, enough for three structures, winter is ending, the days are getting longer, the lake is pooling between the trees.

Also in cypress thin but strong a suitcase. Exhausted every winter night I had much to read and I did so aloud to my astonished sheep, and then I managed to spin and knit a grey lining, I explained to each sheep as I knit that they were moving to Maynard’s, I told them each in turn, over and over as I knit compartments for proper packing, socks in this cone, underwear in that, trauma here here here, my mother’s this here, my father’s that there. An empty one for the bathing suit I will buy.

One of the tins was not photographs but sewing notions, another full of what I at first thought were crammed paper roses but were rolled bills, all hundreds, like honeycomb ransom.

I catch the bus at Maynard's corner, we skirt Lake Superior, I wish the sheep well, I hope for the hive, whatever will be will be.

BANG BANG

There is a certain flavour of happiness, maybe it’s called peace, that comes from tragedy. That’s what I’ve tried to capture in this story. I hope it delivers.

Thanks for being here.

Bang Bang by Sherry Cassells

My brother’s best friend was at our kitchen table every morning, there was an air of exclusivity about him and my mother, I felt he dipped into my share of her and I was mean to him because of it.

Also. He had survived what my brother had not, he was only missing the last three fingers on his left hand like a gun – bang bang – and I was missing an entire person, you’d think that sentence would end right there but there’s more, my father was in his own way also missing, he had been drunk ever since the accident and I did not fault him, had that option been available to me I would have taken it.

Still I wish I had been kinder. I mean the shit we do when we’re young we can never shake off, when we see one another even now there’s the tiniest bit of chewing tinfoil, he has prosthetic fingers but there’s still a gun, he was driving the car, he was blameless but where else could I shove it, the blame I mean, for me it didn’t just get absorbed into the horror of things like it had for my mother, I wanted to shoot him down.

I said bang bang in my head every time I came into the kitchen for breakfast.

Seven days a week he was there. I don’t think my father ever knew this, time didn’t pass in years or seasons those days, time didn’t pass, but there came a day a snowstorm hit early and Boo, his name was Benjamin Oliver O’Kell, he barely made it the three miles to our place. For the first time ever I beat him to the kitchen and I felt his absence in panic, where’s Boo? came out of my mouth before I could stop it, my mother was worrying out the front window and just as I came to her side he appeared in the absolute white, my mother turned and took me in her arms for a single beat of her heart. It had never occurred to me until that moment I could have blamed the weather all along.

But that’s a tough lane to switch into.

He had to stay for two nights. The snow was impenetrable. There were pins and needles everywhere, a sort of static discomfort. The power went out and time kicked in. He brought in wood and kept the fire mad, soon as it would threaten mellow comfort he’d throw on some cedar and we’d get galaxies and crackles, the pins and needles were for where he would sleep and in whose pyjamas. I made the decision. I brought a tracksuit and blankets to the couch, gun cocked he thanked me, and if there’s one thing I could change it would be the way I looked at him in that moment.

I’d really like to change that.

I’m not sure I believe him but he remembers it differently, he remembers that I saved him that night, we are brothers now, he says the look I gave him was pure, he actually uses that word, pure, he doesn’t say pure what, he says he doesn’t think he would have made it through the night in my brother’s room and he shoots me down, bang bang, when I say I wish I’d been kinder. 

Sorry but this is youtube, there’s an ad, and it’s from The Voice, but worth it!

thick ice

I started a story once like this: Had I lived, I would have been a playwright. I can’t remember what it was called, I’ve spent some time looking for it just now, to no avail, it was a bit of a ghost story, told from the perspective of a missing child, maybe it’s a good thing I can’t find it.

But that story got me thinking about being a playwright, I gave it a whirl, got carried away as I almost always do, I ended up with two screenplays and the first season of a sitcom, long story short I recently wrote a 15-minute one act play and sent it to a Canadian Playwright competition, it was based on a short story I wrote called Our Mutual Bones, I wrote it quickly, in one sitting, the other night I got an email saying my play is shortlisted, they will produce six of the shortlisted entries and the combined effort will travel across Canada starting in March so that’s exciting. I get these beautiful little emails once in a while between rejections, they deliver hope and stamina, I keep typing.

Here’s a little story, it started in Thunder Bay, the first sentence anyway, I sort of forgot about it until I remembered, had to honour the source, so here it is .

Thanks for being here.

Thick Ice by Sherry Cassells

Ice comes slowly to a lake, it’s like love, and then all at once you’re head over heels – but rivers are different.

Around here where it's flat and rocky the rivers are tilted and shallow so the best you’re going to get is shelf ice, you’re not going to die if you go through, but if you want to skate skate you go to the lake where the wind keeps the ice clear all the way down the channel. You gotta fox trot the bubbles and branches, skip the stones, watch for fishing holes. The colours are gone, they’re all squeezed into the ice, acute northern lights you can feel yourself skimming them, that’s where the excitement comes from, the glee, that’s what takes your breath away, gravity is also levity.

Skating at night you feel as if you are swinging from the moon.

Winter sunrises kill me, I feel an identical science in my body but in blood and bone. I sit at the kitchen table tweaked, jonesing for the fast cold, I skate to school and then one day I remember this joy is temporary, the collapse comes, this is a summer story from now on, it’s about young love and other acrobatics, the moon is still involved, and the duplicity of a pink sky.

Bonnie was never really my girlfriend but for history’s sake she was my first.

She said she could never love me, she said she couldn’t muster love at all, she whispered that she didn’t even love her parents, her dog, her brother, and it was like she fell through the ice when she said it, like it broke her heart – but I knew better – you can’t break a heart you don’t have. She used to lie all the time. She didn’t even have a brother and her dog was long dead. I told her I didn’t mind that she didn’t love me and it wasn’t a lie at first but then all at once like a swallow I decided to break up with her, she beat me to it, my heart broke maybe in earnest or maybe in pieces of relief.

You can’t ever get it wrong, the ice I mean, there can be no mistakes, everybody remembers the drowned kids and the ones who tried to save them. You could never save them. We were taught that you don’t swerve for animals and you don’t try to save somebody who’s gone through the ice.

But I said this would be a love story, so let's make up the fading stripes of a late summer morning.

Let's say...

I was at the circus with Aunty Grace – this was the end of it, the last day – she wore a dress as if we were in a different century. I was finished high school so there was a different kind of excitement for me, Aunty Grace was teaching me everything I needed to know to take over the farm, she wanted to move closer to town.

There was a tinge of exhaustion about the grounds, the carneys sprayed toothless bribes, the acrobats drew lesser arcs, the clowns dragged their silly feet, the animal moped.

When Aunty Grace had enough I walked her to the gate but I stayed, I sat off to the side in a patch of sunlight near an elephant, she came over and shuffled her foot against me, her skin was all diamonds, I leaned into the leg she offered, she pushed back the equivalent of my weight, we shifted back and forth in a sort of conversation.

That’s when I saw Julie Golightly's long shadow spread over my feet first, my legs lap stomach heart neck mouth eyes, it felt just like skating over the northern lights.

A nice bit OF PERIL

My mother, at and with uncomfortable frequency, shrilled how did I end up in the middle of nowhere. Every time she said it she got a little closer to the door, I always knew she would leave and she did one night, my voice changed calling after her, I opened the door and sopranoed twice before I went forever baritone. When my father came down the hallway in the morning I told him she was gone and he stopped dead, he squinted at me and altoed happy birthday Danny.

We had a rule that you didn’t go to school on your birthday so I stayed in my striped pyjamas, I made coffee under his eye, I drank mine sweet and creamy standing at his side looking out the kitchen window, our fields sleek and frosty, we didn’t say it, there was no need, it was going to snow.

All my life the first snow landed on my birthday and this one, my 13th, was a blizzard, the theme that year was depth, there was a new bottom revealed and I don’t mean this in a bad way, it wasn’t only my voice or her absence that gave the year depth, there was a third thing. We would soon discover she had sold the house, we had to clear out that night, still in my stripes we took what we could and moved to the lake, that’s the other deep, my father’s childhood home.

The house is closer to the cliff now he said as if it had wilfully moved, corner by corner. The theme of my 14th year was erosion, again this was nothing negative – my father said it gave just a nice bit of peril – he believed tragedy and peril preceeded strength and courage, I got used to living on that edge, I don’t think I had been happy before the peril, before the wild water, my 15th year would be rage, not the bad kind, just the energy of it, I learned to roar.

I do not know if I ever dealt with the loss of her, I think I wore it down in my dreams that were like penny operas, my mother lamenting in the wilderness while I sang after her, my voice in reverse, from baritone it torqued into soprano night after night, I never thought of her in the daytime, my father never mentioned her.

Twice a year, Christmas and Thanksgiving, he said at the end of a long and sombre grace, God bless Bethany. All those years I didn’t know he meant my mother, everybody called her Betsy, I didn’t know until I was a grown man with a family of my own, it was my birthday and during the snowy visit there came a knock to the door, a gentlemen straight out of Dickens telling us Bethany Maryanne Gough had died.

So my 67th year was grace, I understood that my father had loved and grieved her and I was able that year to finally do the same.

ROCKPAPERSCISSORS

I wrote this one in Thunder Bay, unusually slowly, started on the plane on the way there and finished on the way home. Longhand. That’s the paper part. The Sleeping Giant is the rock part. The story is the scissors.

It’s funny but I thought it was way longer than it is, feels like maybe the middle dropped out, I hope it works as a story.

Thanks for being here.

RockPaperScissors by Sherry Cassells

I thought of the road again last night like falling into a crease in my mind, I try to scramble from these sorts of things but I rarely can, the gravity is too much, I try to think of something else, counting backwards sometimes works or going through The Lord’s Prayer in my head, but last night it came to me like a movie, and there I was a kid again walking home from school beneath a grey sky, the fall fields on one side and the cooling lake through the forest the other.

The first thing I saw in the distance was a toppled kitchen chair, I didn’t recognize it but the next one was perfectly upright and it was ours, then came other shapes that upon approach proved to be our furniture, the kitchen table was flat across the road its legs splayed like a struck animal and smaller things, some cutlery, spools of thread, a pillow, a blue blouse blown into the forest, I stepped over my father’s belt, instead of going home I turned into Maggie White’s driveway, she was our nearest neighbour, she came to the door, what are you doing here Davy Mac? I didn’t answer, I just pointed to the road, you could see the end of our brown couch, and something white in the forest like snow, my bedspread.

Maggie was a widow, her husband and son had been drowned, she took my hand and together we walked down the road discovering as we went things like a curtain rod, broken plates, my math textbook I had forgotten that morning, a stretch of buttons, my father’s fishing tackle all messed up and linked together. I don’t know what I expected to find but I did not expect to find nothing, the house was empty, my parents were gone, nothing official happened, the bank took the farm and Maggie took me. 

After discovering nothing we went back along the road, I gathered from the forest my mother’s blue blouse, I took spools of thread, my father’s twisted tackle, a pair of red socks, his belt, Maggie took all my mother's unfinished embroideries, the ones depicting in exxes the local scenery, she finished each one, she did the boring bits my mother didn't bother with, the grey skies, the fields, the lake through the forest along the road I cannot forget.

If somebody made a movie of my childhood Part One it would be not silent but quiet, just the whir of a sewing machine, a tractor crisscrossing the window like a slow-motion fly, and in the winter just the whir and the wind,  everything white but for tangles of black thread walnut trees, silver birch zippered along the ridge, seams of rock between fields, sequins from the lake, each season held a different sort of tension, my parents did not speak but in bursts of anger.

When I moved in with Maggie and began Part Two of my childhood, I learned a new sort of abnormality, that of adjustment, the geography was different, we were closer to the lake, it felt too close at times, the fields were behind the house and blurred into one, tufts of stubborn corn still rose here and there, two scarecrows spun like torture.

I slept in Maggie’s son’s bed, on the diagonal, I did not want to fall into his crease.

The room was not a museum nor was it not not a museum. She had turned it into a sewing room but I knew the chaos of such a room and could tell this was never used as such, there were comic books on the bedside table, three rocks and a jellybean, a sewing machine you had to pump was on the desk, a displaced math textbook lay open on the floor.

I didn’t until those days know the consequences of trying not to dream and so that’s what I did, I tried not to dream, and so I dreamed uncontrollably those first few weeks, sepia-toned episodes in which my parents jostled down our road in The Beverley Hillbillies truck, Jethro at the wheel, oblivious to our falling household goods, once in a while my mother called my name into the wind like Aunty Em called Dorothy, with the same sort of futility, it was not clear if they were under duress or experiencing a sort of relief.

This dichotomy was also true of my life.

Gradually I began wearing his things, his winter coat was too small so at night I picked seams and added wedges of fabric from Mr. White’s closet which Maggie opened for me, some plaid, some corduroy, I extended the arms, Maggie said how did you learn to sew like that? and I couldn’t tell her, I had not learned to sew but by observation and had never sewn before yet I could solve all things, Maggie opened a crate of supplies and notions, another of folded fabric, a third of patterns, these were new to me and fascinating, I barely did anything else that first year, I gave the scarecrows new clothes every season, I wore all my own creations and Maggie wore the dresses I made for her, word got out, the kids at school made fun of me at first and then they started asking if I could do bell-bottoms for them, what about a paisley shirt, does corduroy come in purple?

Maggie drew with permanent ink my initials, DM, on white scraps which I affixed as labels into everything I sold, I don’t know when she upside-downed the M and my initials turned to DW, but right around that time began Part Three of my life, when happiness came.

A SPOT FOR HOPE

Hope is a little present you can give yourself and I hope you do.

Thanks for being here.

A Spot For Hope by Sherry Cassells

People from Michigan, when asked by another familiar with their state, where it is that they live or work or were born or married or went to school, point to their palm and say there there there there there. In our before life we had a cottage, we were those privileged kids with two sets of everything from toothbrushes to a hierarchy of lesser friends, it was on Round Lake and people told where they lived according to the twelve o’clock rock, pick me up at 8, I live at 4:30. All this to say we talked with our hands me and my sister Kate, our mother was oblivious to it until she wasn’t, she caught on all at once like Helen Keller, and she knew exactly what we were saying, that we were measuring her mental stability in a language we had created, on a scale we had devised. We communicated through a series of touch points on our hands, a concoction of Round Lake and the Michigan-shaped palm – our own secret language, our gauge, our strategy – until the moment she understood. She seemed to know things, our mother, you should have seen her at Jeopardy! her voice would come from the kitchen, what is Madagascar what is the First Triumvirate what is Pythagorean. So that day in a quiet bloom of understanding she knew she needed help, and when Aunty Caroline came a half hour later for dinner like always, my mother was seated in the chair by the door wearing all blue, her suitcase beside her, the little tri-knock came at the door and Aunty Caroline pushed it open with one finger in jabs of suspense, I wonder what she thought she might find, she didn’t know the massacres were always invisible, me and Kate at the perfectly set table, trembling hands sending trembling messages, there was never any blood or bruise it wasn’t that kind of thing, we were flexible, we learned to bend into whatever shape was necessary. I followed Kate’s lead, we always managed, but were mangled in the process. That day our mother said calmly to her sister as she stood tall in her blue heels and picked up her blue suitcase, take me to the funny farm, Caroline. I don’t know how one moment can be both the best and the worst of your life but that’s how it was for us, there’s a spot on our palms that means manic and there’s a spot for the other way, and a middle finger scale for each – Auntie Caroline said girls you watch TV until I get back – Kate and me we just looked at each other, we didn’t have a spot for hope.​

Your Lint

Last time I said I couldn’t write and now I can’t do anything but, everything works, everything’s good, I can’t tell you how many times I read my own stories and every time I get something at the end, that’s why I write them, so you can get that feeling, too. 

Thanks for being here.

Your Lint by Sherry Cassells

Right at the top I'm going to tell you I never found him, he didn't know about me, Max became my dad, I hope I'm not spoiling the story.

 I thought my father might have been one of the men who barged into town every fall for the Salmon Derby, I never asked my mother if he were a fisherman, some things you don’t need to be told: my father was a fisherman.

They flew in on Bearskin Airlines, each time I heard a plane that week I looked up and tried to get a feeling, a genetic twizzle, I convinced myself an ordinary shiver was a sign, a stomach rumble a sure thing, my father was on that plane. I’d watch it descend behind the trees. We were surrounded by forests, their rapid decline from summer to fall was theatrical, if you closed your eyes and counted to ten, when you opened them again the colours were different.

No kidding.

Things are a bit of a struggle for us. That’s all. My mother is a seamstress and I tie flies that are irresistible to fish and fishermen alike, they don’t get how I do it but there’s nothing to get, I just do it. I am always on the lookout for materials, I reach into the boughs of cedar and pull, I search the shoreline when I can get to it and the sidewalk when I can’t, I comb through the gardens of our neighbourhood, the birds stand by while I get all the good stuff, I rifle through the waste baskets in the art room at school, and I pluck, without shame, little treasures from the janitor’s broom. My mother leaves her leftovers brimming for me in the old goldfish bowl, bits of brocade, fur fluff lace, sequins now and then, and Mr. Dyson across the hall gives me the crinkly coloured cellophane from the Quality Street he’s not supposed to eat, his hands go into his pockets and there’s sometimes bonus stuff comes along in the clutch, always the green triangle chocolate for me, he only likes the ones with toffee.

I used to think he was talking to himself until I got to know him; he was chewing.

Lots of people retire here, most of the clothes my mother makes are dresses for the ladies who spend their lives, she said, playing second fiddle to a fish. She sometimes said how happy she was that it was just the two of us, I mean so was I most of the time, she’d grown up without a father, she and her mother left him when she was twelve and that was it. They followed the rumours and moved back when he went to the city for work.

When I say it was a struggle it was the best of struggles, we loved our work and we worked hard, we had everything we needed, she made my clothes, and if you think I walked around like Orphan Annie or one of the von Trapp curtain-clad kids I did not, she made me overalls I loved, whatever fabric I wanted, with pockets for my bits and pieces, a long one specifically for pussywillows, a plastic lined zippered one at the side of the leg for seaweeds – no pipe cleaners or Christmas tinsel for me – I Frankensteined feathers in a vice at the kitchen table at night while the sewing machine whirred at my side.

My mother once wore three of my flies together, in descending shades of turquoise, she hung them from a common safety pin as a brooch to a Saturday night dance and she told me nobody could take her eyes off of them, or her, that's the night she met Max.

I went a bit overboard on the feathers I admit, got a bit showoffy, I’d like to see the birds that would offer such treasures.

I am also a pickpocket, your lint please sir.

The fishermen would get taxis from the airport to town, they arrived with a roar, we lived above the Main Street Diner and they would come up our stairs and knock on the door, some of them I remembered and some were new to me, I invited them in, I tried for the twizzle, my mother rarely looked up. I made a killing those two weeks, they almost always gave me a tip, once I got a fifty dollar bill, they staggered out the door holding their flies up like they were angels or something.

Are you ready for the bit about when I did get the twizzle?

He was by himself. When I answered the door I noticed right away his blue eyes but he was too old, he said I hear you’ve some terrific flies for sale and that was it, there was the twizzle, my mother looked up from her sewing machine with only her eyes at first, he plunked his heavy hand on my shoulder, he said her name like it was just a word, he said Stella straight across the room, she lifted her whole face, and then they weren’t just words anymore, he cast them across the room Stella? Stella? Stella?

She stood up, I was confused, happy but disappointed, all the dreams I had of my handsome father in none of them did he look like this, but it wasn’t my day after all, he was not my father, he was hers.

THE RECURRING RED SCARF

As I was recording this it occurred to me that the most important thing about this story is the enormity of the word almost. To be almost anything allows the possibility of its opposite. Almost certain means uncertainty. Almost hopeless means hope.

Thanks for being here.

The Recurring Red Scarf by Sherry Cassells

My father flies down the street, that’s it, that’s the dream.

As far as recurring dreams go I think it's fabulous, whenever I think of it during the day it sort of zooms around my insides a while and then always I get the dream that night, sometimes twice in one night, once when I was sick it came all night on repeat, that was the night I nearly died, they said they didn't know how I pulled through with a temperature that high.

He doesn’t actually fly, nothing Superman or Icarus, there is no effort on his part, he simply floats but with v-v-v-verve.

He wears a suit. He is slim. A white shirt and tie. Like the day he died. Briefcase dangling at his side. Through the living room window of my childhood I saw him walking down the street and in the dream it's the same except he's flying. I’m looking up the street and it’s snowing, I don’t know what I’m looking for in the dream so each time it’s a surprise when he flies through the snow, I can’t tell what kind of a surprise it is, it's almost like nothing, and please note that the word almost is enormous in this context.

And it's always snowing. I never used to think about it but now I worry he might be cold, I am disappointed in this dream’s complete inability to evolve, he should by now at least be wearing a scarf. No wait. I take that back. I do not want the dream to evolve. Forget the scarf, for should it evolve one knitted row at a time surely he would age, he would diminish in lustre, flightability and frequency. Forget I mentioned it.

My grief is also non-evolving, it remains enormous, and perhaps I choose this, he walked home from work handsome in his suit, fell into my arms and died, that’s it.

My mother is old now, she sits in the half-hospital by the window and looks out, a pile of red knitting on her lap, she picks it up occasionally and manages a few stitches, some days a full row, I ask her what she’s making and she always says the same thing, a scarf for your father, maybe she sees him too.

I sit by her side. She is tired. I know there will be nothing left of her when she dies, it's already happening, she will disintegrate and be gone but my father will fly forever.

first snow

I couldn’t write a story last week, had to work too hard at it and you can always tell when that’s the case, nothing’s surprising or weird and I love surprises and weirdness. Started this one early this morning because I wanted to share that first snow feeling, I hope you get it but I know you’ll get it from this Anne Sexton piece I hang on my wall every winter, it’s probably 40 years old, an old photocopy, here’s what it says:

“I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.”
– Anne Sexton, in a letter to W.D. Snodgrass (November 28, 1958)”

Did you get it?

Thanks for being here.

First Snow by Sherry Cassells

I woke up with that feeling again.

We left at first snow, in the dark through its white stars. I wondered what she was thinking, my mother as she clutched that steering wheel, her breath in little white bursts, I mean it wasn’t every day you left your life, and True in the back seat, I was afraid she was going to cry, but all she said was how can every snowflake be different?

We drove through it quietly, all edgeless and soft, almost like dreaming. By the time we got to the lake the sun was coming at us through those tall cedars in slices you could feel, my mother straight and silent at the wheel, she turned to me at the stop sign, then to True in the back seat, and the car swung left. 

I got butterflies when we didn’t take the usual right turn and now, all these years later, I get them again at every first snow.

We drove through those chunks of sunlight like corduroy, I looked into the little mirror at the fury of smoke that bubbled over the diminishing shipyards and factories of town, the mill where my father sometimes worked, I wondered if he was awake yet, we drove four more hours without saying a word, I watched the sharp horizon, the dark blue now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t of Lake Superior. Suze had put a pillow on the fourth passenger's shoulder, she slept with her head on Judy, my mother's mannequin, the sewing machine on Judy's other side, my mother sewed dresses and gowns rich ladies bought long-distance.

Our departure had elements of meticulous planning – she'd asked me over the past week to arrange all the spools of thread into a pouch which I did like a sunset, she'd had me tidy the bolts and rolls and folds of fabric, gather all the notions and parts and buttons and sequins I could get into a single cookie tin – but there was also a sense of acute mayhem. When she woke us up she said our stuff was already in the car, she said just to take our pillows and blankets and slippers, turned out we left the green garbage bag full of our clothes on the dark driveway, we were still in our pyjamas when we stopped for breakfast.

The waitress gave us hot chocolate milkshakes for free, as we left she handed my mother a gigantic coffee in a Mel's Diner cup and said it's on the house. We stopped for gas, to pee, and for grilled cheese twice, and at nightfall we swung off the highway, it was still snowing, I thought of my dad, the house full of drunk people by now like always.

We drove into whatever town it was and we got a hotel, we took the unit at the end, me and True shared a bed, we watched Lost In Space and ate sardines.

I woke in the night, the TV was still on, salt and pepper with a silent white dot, my mother was outside wrapped in her bedspread sitting in the chair by the door, her breath in long white clouds, the snow had stopped but there remained a kind of white spray.

I looked at her face in the moonlight – this also comes to me at the first snow – she had the non-expression that she’d had all day.

It was only then that I realized I didn’t know where we were. It hadn’t occurred to me which direction we were going, nor was I concerned with why or when.

She turned and looked at me, nothing on her face at all, I opened the door and smiled – I knew how was her courage and that was all that mattered – she smiled back.

Theo waits

Working hard, that’s the wrong word, not hard but non-stop on a story right now I don’t know if it’s really good or really not good but I gotta tell you there’s a deep thrill about it, it’s like I’m in a wild river when I write it, somebody once told me I write like a river and at the time I didn’t get it but now maybe I do. So this is a consolation story, it’s one I wrote a while ago and never posted, that happens sometimes and I find them between the cracks and read them and it feels almost like I didn’t write them. This is one of those caught-in-the-cracks stories.I hope you like it.

Thanks for being here.

Unless you are talking about things I can plant in my stories, like the wooden bridge that went sideways during winter storms or the sound of night hockey out the lake or the rocks you placed in the corners of your tent so you wouldn’t fly away, I am not listening. I am making people up instead.

I use my father’s blue eyes to feel a flash of him and for my mother it’s flowers, just a hint, and then somebody like Theo lands on the page and we’re off.

He blew in over night. I saw the lights whir around my bedroom, just a second of a blueredbluered and then only white for a long time which was perfect because I had maybe four pages to go and my flashlight was barely a ghost.

I heard car doors and voices, there was a final whir of colour, and if I thought about anything besides The Mystery of the Old Clock, it was that maybe Syd had finally come home from the hospital. It didn’t occur to me that it could be a kid because they hadn’t fostered anybody, besides me of course, since Syd’s heart attack.

But in the morning there was Theo sitting on the front porch and when I came out we just stared at each other until Hazel came out and said your mother’s on the phone and in he went like there was suddenly a magnet. That’s when Hazel said he’s had a rough time of it this one so you be nice as if I wasn’t nice to all of them.

I mean seriously.

I make people up so that I can love them.

I gave Theo curly hair and too short corduroy pants when it was so hot outside and nails gnawed to rinds. It seemed natural to give him the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen when he came back onto the porch, from crying I think, and then Hazel sort of winded her way into the soil of the garden, giving us some space.

This story is when phones were attached to houses and Theo said I need to stay by the phone when I  said he could come with me to the park if he wanted, and by the park, I meant the wet ledges above the forbidden rapids. Hazel gave me a look so I sat beside him instead and said to myself maybe tomorrow about the rapids.

Everybody on our street was old. Hazel said pretty soon there’d be young families moving in, kids all over the place, that was how neighbourhoods worked – but I was lonely and I hoped Theo would stick around until Hallowe’en at least – which worked the opposite way on our street. Scary old people came to my door and handed me regular-sized chocolate bars and big bags of Lays and entire bouquets of Tootsie Pops, homemade old-people-cookies that Hazel ended up taking for the nurses when she visited Syd.

Sometimes the neighbours said boo! and wow! at my costume, and asked me to spin around.

Took two weeks for Theo to budge from the porch, but by August we were riding our bikes to the rapids and lying that we’d run through sprinklers on lawns here and there because of our wet clothes and even that met with soft disapproval.

He stayed for Hallowe’en, Christmas, and we shared a paper route more precarious than the rapids, both our bodies required to weigh down the bridge we staggered across to Clear Island where the nuns lived, until Sister Theodore saw us in the pink of a blizzard one morning and intervened, allowing us to hand her the paper at school instead, so we only had to cross the darkening bridge for Thursday collections, a hockey game echoing down the lake.

We saved our money and bought a mail-order pup-tent into which we shoved a layer of rocks so we wouldn’t blow off the ledge when we camped at the rapids the following summer, while Hazel and Syd, who was better by then, believed we set up camp in the manicured frills of the park where they thought we spent most of our time.

The rapids were loud and we had to holler to be heard and it was beyond exciting like Niagara Falls built for two.

I don’t think my mom’s going to call Theo hollered one day.

I heard him but I made him say it again and then one more time in case it got easier because that’s how I’d done it when I knew my parents weren’t ever coming back. I just kept saying it. And every morning instead of saying today’s the day they’re going to come get me I said maybe tomorrow but not today.

Because you can’t just throw hope away or holler it out, it has to become part of you, like an organ.

THE BIG HALF

Something about the way things are divvied up, nothing’s really parcelled out equally is it, do you think it’s according to one’s expectations? Do you think the question who do you think you are anyway is loaded? Mathematics aside, do you think the bigger half comes to those who believe they deserve it?

Do you think I ask too many questions?

Do you think your big half diminishes the other half or do you think that they are the same size but your eyes are wider or you’re more grateful, maybe more self-grateful.

And not a moment too soon, here’s a little story.

Thanks for being here.

There were three of them at the cottage the weekend Helen and Maddie met, the two girls looked like twins, one would assume this was because of their common father, but later in the evening they each pulled from similar pockets in similar purses pictures of their similar mothers, both of them confidently beautiful, dark haired, intelligent looking women.

I told Helen her mother looked like Mary Tyler Moore – so much for third person – she said my mother looked like Laure Petrie from that show with Dick Van Dyke.

Sunday afternoon I was on the train slamming home through New York State, I was trying to pull myself together, the swirly blur of forest/mountain/field/stream reminded me of the way the passage of time – backward and forward – is sometimes depicted in movies.

I tried to concentrate on my book, we had to read it for school, but my eyes kept bouncing from the page to the window, I could half-see my reflection – can anyone read The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter without looking sullen? – the autumn light gave a particular glow to the forest so that I felt as if I were dreaming, I half expected Biff to appear knee deep in the golden leaves, Mick Kelly sending leaves to the ground as she climbed the giant maple above him.

I put the book down and went through my purse, I was feeling dislodged and my arranged possessions helped to ground me, my sunglasses in their case, my slim wallet, unnecessary gloves folded into one another, lip balm, Lifesavers, ticket stubs, a pouch of barely scented lavender, in the zipper a handkerchief and the envelope which held the picture of my mother. I pulled it out for further grounding but got the opposite, it was Mary Tyler Moore, I'd taken the wrong one. The lighting on the train was far better than the fire-lit evening when Helen and I handed one another our beautiful dead mothers. This time I really looked and in a cracking moment, two things occurred to me: Laura Petrie was Mary Tyler Moore; and Helen’s mother was my mother’s sister.

I felt like I already half-knew about MTM – I mean how could I not have? – but the sisterhood came to me sudden as a summer storm, complete with galeforcewinds.

My mother rarely mentioned her sister – and when she did her voice went stringy and awful – do you remember the way Linda Blair sounded? I was curious but never asked her to extrapolate, for I was sensitive to my mother’s demons, too sensitive if such a thing exists, I feared what she feared and loathed what she loathed, with gusto. I couldn't remember my father, also with gusto. He had a new wife and daughter somewhere, my mother laughed when she told me he’d left them, too, I’d never heard her laugh like that and never wanted to hear it again.

Back to third – sounds like baseball doesn’t it? – we're all fans today, but I am talking about third person.

Maddie sat on the edge of her seat, as if she were a gape-mouth statue whizzing through the wilderness, this is what happens to people as the penny drops.

When my mother died I half-died, too.

I was brought up in foster homes, too old to be adopted, I moved around a lot, Child Services didn’t care about that and neither did I, their goal was to keep me in the same school, but to keep me in the same home was impossible. The woman in charge had been an army brat, her words, the rug beneath her feet always yanked away, she told me once she went to seventeen high schools and she waited for me to say something about it, she nodded, eyes closed, when I eventually did, I said se-ven-teen?

Helen had been to my school briefly, she was just a little younger than me and I half-remembered her – the small half – a temporary angel, I’d felt something when I saw her but before I had the chance to talk to her she was gone. When I went to the office and asked, they didn’t know who I meant, the always-annoyed secretary told me to go back to class and stop with all the questions, who did I think I was anyway.

Good question.

It was Mrs. Peel from the Child Services who discovered we were related, she got notice that my father had died and left behind two daughters both of whom were in her care. My mother had switched back to her maiden name; Helen’s had not.

Mrs. Peel was the third person at the cottage.

She kept her distance, she said she forgot her book and asked if either of us had anything she could read and we both offered her Carson McCullers, she laughed and said that was the one she’d been reading, too, we all laughed, what a coincidence, I don’t know why she took them both but she did. She went into her bedroom and we didn’t see much of her the entire weekend, she cooked for us, a little sullen she seemed to pine out the window, we ate together, not sullen but not anything else either – pass the salt, is there any butter, this ham is good, is there mustard, do you think the water’s safe to drink, may I have ginger ale, have you ever tried tea with lemon, I smell burnt toast, here, have an orange.

Being abandoned by the same father united us in a way, of course we hugged and smiled, but our hearts – I’m sliding into third again here – but their hearts were only warmed. Perhaps their lives would be aligned for a while, maybe they’d spend a Christmas or two together, they wrote down one another’s birthdays, addresses, and exchanged telephone numbers, politely said sweet dreams in unison and closed their bedroom doors with a click of relief.

I like the fly-on-the-wallness of third person.

Helen was on a bus, Mrs. Peel had driven her to the depot and then taken Maddie to the train station, Helen was uncomfortable and restless, there was a stink for one thing, and the roar of the engine, the dragon brakes, she went through the events of the weekend, its disappointments – half-sisters is not the big half – she was surprised to find herself crying. She reached into her purse for a handkerchief, the envelope came with it, and she then made the same discovery Maddie had only moments before made, she sat a gape-mouth statue within her own blur.

Helen says she called me but I remember it the other way around, we talk about it all the time, every once in a while I’ll look over at her and say I called you, I might ask to borrow a sweater or something and when she presses it into my hands she’ll say I called you.

But I remember the way she answered the phone, she could barely say my name and I could only whisper hers.

What’s important is that we suddenly had the big half of everything.

ZIGGY TUPPER

So many true bits in this one along with all the lies. Sometimes I forget which is which.

Thanks for being here.

Ziggy Tupper by Sherry Cassells

He used to let me read his stories and I was taken by his handwriting, it was beautifully unconventional, I didn’t come to understand for some time that his penmanship controlled the speed at which I read, allowing the story to get into my bones, and in the night it would find me again, that was the beginning of my insomniac years which continue, I love waking up to sentences.

That was 30 years ago. Thirty is my go-to number, it explains most things including the pounds I am overweight, the minutes I am late for almost everything, the dollars I am always short, I still live in the same house, 30 Rowatson Drive.

I read the first one over his shoulder on the hill where we ate lunch, thought I got away with it until that evening after dinner the doorbell rang and it was him, easy as pie he said I wondered if you’d like to read another and this went on for the rest of high school, he brought me stories a couple of times a week, I’d give him his old ones back, worn and torn, I ran upstairs to my room and was already reading, or seeking, or whatever I was doing, word by word, and when I say his penmanship was controlling, I think those first sentences made me look up on purpose because there he always was on the sidewalk, through all the weather in the world.

Today my doorbell rang and I got a wallop of deja vu, I don’t get a lot of visitors, I remembered the way it felt to open the door to him, to surrender, and I half-expected it to be him again after all these years, but it was a delivery, the guy asked if my name was Claire Desjardins, which it is, and I signed for a box with my name on it, from Dunn, Forester and Silver, solicitors.

I ran up to my room.

Dear Claire
I have never done my best at anything until now, I am doing my best at dying.

I looked out the window to the empty sidewalk.

His writing was loose, nothing touched, heavy looping descenders and barely there ascenders, it reminded me of the bedside monitor my mother had been attached to, his signature, Ziggy Tupper, the final stagger across the page, and beneath it, all the stories in the world.

There’s one about a man who can’t stand any light at night, it drives his wife crazy, although she cannot detect it, she goes to turn off the offending switch, he is always right, there's a light left on in the bathroom downstairs or the one in the oven or sometimes it’s the moon she drags the curtain over it like a spell, but this one night the man comes to bed and it’s his wife who says but there’s a light on. Earlier in the day the man bought a few things for the fishtank, two plants and a gnarly piece of wood, somebody at dinner commented on the pinkish tint of the water, it looked like sunset in that tank and it was very beautiful, but the colour was the canary, it indicated toxins, all the fish died but for one the man was able to rescue and put into another tank, which was already set up, waiting to house the small goldfish in the cooling pond outside. I have left a light on for the fish, he said.

There’s one about a math teacher who gives his best student a problem to solve over the weekend, it’s all the numbers between 10 and 100, and the challenge is for the kid to determine how they are arranged and we see that kid all weekend flipping pages in his notebook, trying over and over again, never giving up until it’s Monday morning and he hasn’t got it, he doesn’t want to go to school, he plans on walking his little sister to school and coming back to the empty house to work on it again, on the way there his kid sister says what’s bugging you Clem and he says it’s a problem I can’t figure out and she says mom says to talk about your problems so try talking to me and he does, he tells her about it and she says so what, go to school and tell Mr. Smith you can’t figure it out. Such a simple solution, and so that’s what he does, in the way he’s tried to reduce numbers he reduces himself and it’s when he is in this reduced state he glances one more time at the numbers and sees they are in alphabetical order.

There’s a love story separated by the Irish Sea.

A whispering horse.

Every so often a perfect day with Claire.

100 per year for 30 years there are thousands.

The first sentence is what comes through my bones at night, and I get a moment of how it felt when I saw him on the sidewalk, I can’t tell you why I didn’t love him out loud.

SHELLL

Don’t you just love Saturday mornings?

Shelll by Sherry Cassellls

When you look at a map, Ireland looks like it’s blowing away. I used to think it was on the wrong side. Everything’s been off kilter my whole life maybe because I was one of those kids born left-handed and forced into right-handedness, I did not have my bearings, not in the slightest.

And it should come as no surprise after that opening paragraph when I tell you I overthought almost everything, wait, I overthought everything, including established fundamentals such as gravity and what happens when you hold your breath for too long, is there a parallel universe or another me somewhere who is righted in her space, lands on her feet in a coordinated universe, unlike my ballad of a life in which both my parents were freshly dead, like O’Leary and O’Reilly, neither of them knew the other was dead, they died in separate accidents during the same ice storm, and I was alone in the world, my only goal was to become a left-handed orphan.

I was 12.

Q: How many syllables are in the word twelve?

A: If you say it quickly there’s only one but if you say it like the lady at children’s aid, like a cough you’ve had for too long or too heavy a burden, it has many moving parts, hinges more than syllables, t-w-el-ve.

I had to fill out forms with my hieroglyphics, my checkmarks went backwards, I curled my tongue in concentration, it was difficult like chin-ups, how easy it would have been to quit or switch to the other hand but this was my quiet rebellion, my chance at authenticity before I knew the word. The hardest was my name, Shelby, I couldn’t get the final three consonants to comply and so I turned them all into ells, my triple consonants looked embroidered, I wrote it Shelll.

Nobody could find my birth certificate so they gave me a new one with my name Shell Ernest Frost and my place of birth Castlerock Beach although I was actually born in Belfast, the city on the fraying coast I always thought belonged on the left of the island, facing Canada, where I landed a year later, after a stint of special education due to bad penmanship, but once I got the hang of it, my rise to the top of the class was rapid and shocking, I was moved into the normal curriculum and again, rose to its top.

It was discovered I had a aunt after all and she came for me.

And as if in a ballad she fell to her knees when she saw me, I heard her bones against the floor, I walked solemnly toward her clutching my suitcase, I looked down at my pigeon-toed feet in their black heavy shoes, I was dizzy and frazzled, she took me in her arms and I felt some sort of digestion take place, I don’t know how else to explain it, that hug was a work of art, and as such I do not wish to study it too closely.

I don’t think I had laughed for a year but I couldn’t stop, I was embarrassed, so used to being in the same old ballad, she let go of me and reached for my suitcase with her left hand, she winked at me, she said we had to hurry to catch the plane and I know how this is going to sound but it wasn’t until we were in the air I realized what was going on, I looked through the window, through the fog, her hand was on my shoulder, and everything was in the right place.

Overnight

Everything changed overnight. We were record-breakingly hot the past few days, the lake’s been gorgeous, the sky never-ending blue and now it’s raining and then it’s going to go back to seasonal and pretty soon the clocks are going to change and it’ll be dark for dinner.

It’s raining hard. Still dark but I can hear the chickens chattering the sky is falling the sky is falling the sky is falling.

These few days have been our glorious Indian Summer which is no longer an acceptable way to describe this amazing time of year. I mean I get it, it is said to be disrespectful of our Indigenous Peoples who deserve nothing but respect, but to me the term translates into a beautiful and fleeting calm before the storms and nothing else. We are encouraged to use easier-to-take synonyms such as Second Summer, not bad, but might take a while to catch on, or maybe we should try a sudden warm spell in autumn which does not evoke any specific treachery.

Do you ever wonder what future generations will abolish about our lives? Besides changing the clocks I mean. Will a Chinook stil be a Chinook?

This story is about hope and change and giving people a break.

Thanks for being here.

Overnight by Sherry Cassells

None of us thought my father would get another job. There was something awful about seeing him at breakfast all clean-shaven and white-shirted, the way he looked when he swung out the door with his briefcase – empty, I knew – but for a cheese sandwich and a paper airplane.

Out of the blue my father had to quit his job as a commercial airline pilot.

At first I wondered whether his fear of heights happened all at once like the way my voice had changed overnight or if it was a more gradual thing, but judging by the new wide-eyedness about him I think it was sudden. Also new, and this is what I meant about the way he looked when he went out the door, there seemed to be something heavy in his mouth.

My school was downtown and sometimes I’d see that swinging briefcase when I went to Woolworth’s for lunch. I’d see him go into office buildings like war he’d shoulder the door open and I’d see him come out those same doors not war not peace. Through my own reflection I saw him on the other side of windows, in coffee shops or the library, sometimes on park benches or sitting still on some hill somewhere, I don’t think he ever saw me back, this went on all of grade 10 and 11 but at the beginning of grade 12 he got a job, janitor, my high school.

I had mixed feelings about it.

I mean it would be a relief to not have to look for him like Waldo every day – but but but – who wants their father pushing a broom down the hallway of his youth?

I am not sure I am normal. Does everybody feel this way? Is it normal to question one’s normalcy? There are a few things I am concerned about, I bear my own heaviness that’s for sure, but I am mostly concerned about the way I borrow emotions because I don’t really get them on my own. Like on the day he said at the dinner table that he got the janitor job at my school, I copied my mother's reaction, I mean right to the bone. I made the same gestures as her, the same face, I folded my hands the same way in the same coordinates of my lap, and I got, in a sort of cloak-and-dagger way, the feeling her body language conjured, which I am ashamed to say was shame itself.

So there he was on Monday morning. He didn’t have a uniform at first so it looked weird, you know, as if he were just borrowing the broom, but a couple of days later he got a grey uniform which was better – and also worse.

Thank goodness he started work an hour before I started school – no doorway calisthenics necessary or sidewalk etiquette required – he walked to school in normal clothes, the overalls in his briefcase along with a cheese sandwich and, you guessed it, a paper airplane.

Not everybody knew he’d quit his job.

Isn’t that your dad? Is that your–? Matt! What’s your dad doing here? Matt? What's goin’ on, Matt? Matt Matt Matt

It was a big deal at first but by winter things calmed down. In the same way he didn’t see me downtown, he didn’t see me in school, even when I walked solo down the hallway he didn’t look.

Those long hallways.

I don’t know if he had the idea all of a sudden or if he thought about it a while but he did something that changed everything overnight, such a simple thing, one morning he took the paper airplane from his briefcase and sent it down the middle of the long, shiny hallway.

We kept our classroom doors open to prepare us for the chaos of university or maybe just life, and so it caught our collective eye, Mrs. Rule wandered into the hallway to see what that flash had been, I saw her lean out and turn her head one way and then the other. When she stepped out of the classroom, I got up and stood at the door. Mr. Smith was in the hallway, too, my dad holding his pose like Baryshnikov at one end, and his sleek white airplane, still airborne, at the other end. We watched it in the spotlit hallway slowly slowly slowly it cascaded elegantly, without apparent gravity, molecule by graceful molecule, down down down.

Mr. Smith slow-whistled and Mrs. Rule sort of laughed, next thing you know my dad always had people around him. He showed the little kids how to make construction paper airplanes, and with us he got technical, he talked about drag and drop, lift, weight, thrust, he drew diagrams with dashed curves and symbols we'd never seen but were eager to understand. Along with Mr. Smith he started a Flight Club (you know the first rule). He was invited to make guest appearances in classrooms and on stage during assemblies, and pretty soon if your teacher was away you might be lucky enough to get him as a sub. I didn’t know you could just suddenly be a teacher but they made him the home room teacher for grade 13 just when I was in grade 13 – what an honour.

I don't know. Maybe all the knowledge and enthusiasm was in me from the start, but it sure felt like an overnight thing. I went to bed kind of a troubled kid one night and woke up different the next morning.

Autumn corrected

I don’t know what it is but the Sea seems to have taken over Lake Superior which has been my go-to body of water all along, it just sort of comes and I let it, and then the atmosphere of the story changes and then the story itself.

I don’t know or understand the Sea. Good thing my characters do.

Thanks for being here.

by Sherry Cassells

Can you stand one more story about the Sea?

We lost Uncle Jack to the sea every spring. Late autumns he came back to us, a little listing at first, but after a week or so he righted himself and that’s when he start coming into the gathering darkness of my room at night to tell me stories of his adventures.

I put down my book and waited a few seconds of airless forever for him to begin, his moonlit hands churned with the story as if he were painting, spreading great swirls of ceruleans and phthalos to give me an idea of the sea, the real sea, the wild and distant one I didn’t yet know.

When I close my eyes there’s the lightfast sea he gave me with word and colour, beneath great clouds of tumbling dark and titanium light, no shore, the sea like the skin of a plum, at the horizon glimpses of nectar, the idea of a ship, the whip of a single white sail.

Perhaps in greater detail than I remember the people of my own life, I remember those who worked the ships with Jack, the preposterous few he painted for me in the dark, the ones who came through his stories with stories of their own.

His Australian friend Sandy who married another Sandy, and their sandy-haired children, all of whom were geniuses, his home a mechanical wonder, nothing existed without the realization of its equal and opposite, it was a kinetic kingdom. His son invented healing cream that replaced medical attention, the children were adventurers, they soared, they fell, they learned, they healed. His daughters grew eggplant and rhubarb in a bubbly mixture of pebble and flotsam. Together, all of the children built a storm shelter. His youngest son made a device involving a slide rule and a notched disk which whirred from one end, and from it, he, and only he, could predict the tides with 100% accuracy. A few of the middle children constructed a web-like flurry of bells that hung like musical gossamer between the house and the sea, its sharps and flats forecast storms, they knew the ones to attend and never missed an opportunity to huddle together in their shelter overlooking the sea and say oooooh and aaaaah.

Matty who lived with his mother in Scotland and cried for her on difficult nights. He had two extra thumbs, one per hand, and a deep trove of a voice. When they all sang before bed he looked up to the moon and whatever went on behind his gigantic Adam’s apple spilled into the night and sank beneath the darkness. Uncle Jack said he was such a big bag of nothing he was never without a swarm of rope and would tether himself to the gunnels when the sea picked up, those spare thumbs that jutted from the base of his others made Matty the best knotter to ever have lived.

Uncle Jack absorbed bits of each of them, that’s what we do, isn’t it? 

Sometimes I woke up to a knot he left on my pillow, so fierce and complicated, the moment I picked it up, it fell apart in my hands. He told me about the flurry of bells in his head and it was as if through his explanation the same web-like flurry self-constructed in my own head – there it goes – I don’t know what to make of it, how to read the sky according to make-believe notes on a make-believe scale, yet it jangles, its job perhaps less specific than weather prediction, I think all of its sounds mean the same one thing: NOTICE! NOTICE! NOTICE!

I found his stories unbelievable yet I believed them.

A man with no ears who heard through his mouth, another with a backwards eyeball who could see his own brain, a few scientists, some mad, a poet, always an astronomer, although all seamen believe themselves to be in this category. When he talked of the men who believed in heaven, his arms shoved the paint upward, I was out of my league, for we knew nothing of heaven in our house against the sea, and it nothing of us.

Eventually I met some of them, he brought Matty home for Thanksgiving one year, I heard him crying baritone through the wall. In the same room he allowed the gruesome madness of the one with the backwards eyeball, who was also the poet, to stay the winter.

There were others, a quandary of them, I have known oddballs.

And I had the excellent fortune of meeting the youngest daughter of the Sandys, Gayle, who is today my wife. She and my green-thumbed daughters wait for me, their bells on edge, they run out toward the sea, the stripes on their dresses loosening to the wind, all arms point in unison to the spot where the storm will gather, as if they are sorcerers, as if they conjure the storms themselves, as if they together are God, or, if you prefer, the Sea.

Taken by the Sea can mean death, or it can mean love.

We all had someone taken, not everyone returned, but Uncle Jack came back every autumn, a little shadowy at first, candlelit in the middle of the day, burnt umber and faded everything, each time it took longer for him to correct.

I was eventually taken by the sea, too.

When the sea calls it calls not only to the heart but to the brine in which it beats.

I never forgot about Uncle Jack during his absences, he was in a pre-flooded chamber of my mind, rowing and ageing, as I am now, for an instant I hope, in a chamber of yours.

AS IF TO THE SEA

I wanted to get this story out of the way, that sounds awful and feels a bit ruthless, so disrespectful after going through this little darling word by word, breath by breath, but I’ve already started the next one and it’s pretty exciting watching the plot swing back and forth.

This story is true in some ways, I did attach a reel to my dad’s favourite chair when he was failing, and when he made it go t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t, he looked as if he were watching the sea.

Thanks for being here.

As If To The Sea by Sherry Cassells

That’s how he looked, my father, as if he were watching the sea.

I sat beside him, rocking, lest I die of stillness.

Sometimes I went t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t to make it sound like he was fly fishing, and something more came unto his face, like the discovery of a sharp flavour in the mouth, his face did whatever it is the face does to indicate a zing of pleasure.

I was not told what happened and I didn’t ask. I would have liked to tell my classmates, they buzzed around me with their questions and rumours those first few days of shock, but l hate things like that, I watch the reflected TV in the window when scary movies are on, I learned to look at my father without seeing.

Before the swelling, when it was just juicing up, he said there was a bird in his head.

I imagined this. I pictured a small, neat and colourful bird in the gigantic sky of my father’s mind. But his bird, he said an hour later, was a trouble-maker. So in that sky I gave the bird some sharp turns and close calls. At night, when he said the bird was getting bigger and faster, I increased both wingspan and torque. In the morning when he said in feathers that his head was full of bird, he wasn’t exactly sure who I was. I imagined the bird contorted, somersaulting against bone, while my father watched the television like the sea, the window like the sea, and he watched me, his ever-rocking daughter, like the sea.

t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t

Quickly quickly when I looked into his eyes I’d see feathers pressed behind his busy pupils, magnified and distorted, something too big in a washing machine like the time my brother Stanley put the cushion in after Trapper peed on it, there wasn’t room for it to turn, same with the bird.

Enormous. It was enormous.

As if he were in the middle of the sea my father splashed and grappled for a boat, a lifejacket, anything, he sputtered his mother’s name when I walked into the room.

At first I told him the truth about my dead grandmother but his face went like a cliff and from then on I lied to to man who had taught me to never lie, I was whoever he thought I was, t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t.

Between the wild shifts of the bird, he was quiet.

He was only 38. It was an accident at work. Something from a great height fell and didn't kill him.

I heard my mother whisper into the phone to aunt Shell that she wished it had but I don’t think she meant it, maybe in the moment she said it but not after, she sat beside him and held his hand, she squeezed and pumped it vigorously, as if it were a back-up heart.

Except for the first few days of panic, I didn’t go to school, they let me do my work at the hospital which I did with great enthusiasm. He didn’t do much, for a long time he couldn’t even open his eyes for all the swelling, he looked like I saw Mohammed Ali on television once, no eyes, almost like his head was made of iron, except my father's body was surprisingly white, shocking how thin.

I did my homework, t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t, long division and spelling words like accommodate and conscientious. I read a story, a myth I suppose, Androcles and the Lion, I tried math on the number of days he hadn’t spoken, I divided it by the way you spell G O D, and I tried praying, which I’d never done before in earnest, I found it similar to wishing at first but I was nervous and I soon found myself pleading.

Always just the right tension, t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t.

 My mother and father used to fight about how much he loved fishing, she yelled, flushed,  if I’d known I would have to play second fiddle to a fish… it was an empty threat but that didn’t make me feel any better, maybe worse, what would she do? Shoot herself, shoot him, leave him, leave us????

 In a month his face was less swollen, allowing his eyes to squirt open.

I brought him his best lures, I hung them in front of the window where they caught the sun and spun long bubbles of light throughout the room, over us like footprints, he said a few words but I couldn’t tell what they were, I responded with t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t, his body a valley in the soft bed, he looked through them to the sea, surely you must know that’s a euphemism, the sea was a long way away.

 The first word I actually heard was an account of the bird in his head, he used his curled up hand to bounce a finger against a temple, busy, he said and I hoped it was busy shrinking, but I must have heard that word in a you-hear-what-you-want-to-hear way, the doctor was there at the time, he said the word was dizzy.

My little brother Stanley started coming to visit, the swelling was almost gone, revealing the stranger he had become, his head was still stained, his face twisted as if he were about to laugh, his eyes as if to the sea.

 I stayed in my corner, t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t, I roared to the top of my class, my own bird now a genius, they started calling my father recovering, but I learned that recovery is relative, and terribly slow.

 He continued to look through me, as if to the sea, I continued my stutter t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-trying to catch him and bring him home.

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The Pearl

The only thing I work harder on than a good short story is a bad one. It’s like the squeaky wheel thing, the ones that glide onto the page I never pay much attention to, they’re fine, but the ones that I have to pin down word-by-word, the ones that keep me awake at night, the characters to whom I’ve given the wrong names – I can’t leave them alone. That’s what this story was like, the title specifically, I’ve changed it maybe a million times and am still not sure. I was going to call it My Mothers but it looked like it was missing an apostrophie and I can’t handle that. My pet grammatical peeve. Otherwise rules for writing are overrated, I think normalcy in general is overrated, I think I would have been a good waitress and perhaps missed my calling as a Fortune Cookie Writer. Know anybody who’s hiring?

Offered to you in the least Steinbeck-y way possible, here is The Pearl.

Thanks for being here.

The Pearl by Sherry Cassells

All my life I’ve had an outlaw personality – my mother wished aloud that I was normal – she said I was just like her scoundrel of a sister and I wore that accusation like a halo even before I met Auntie Grace.

I thought she was too good to be true, this wild, much younger aunt, it was as if she were a fake thing my mother held up as the brunt of cautionary tales. She said if you do that – where that represented a beautiful misadventure – you’ll end up like Aunty Grace.

Since I wanted nothing more than to be like Aunty Grace, I did exactly as I pleased.

The first time I saw her for real was the night before I started high school. I don’t know what I expected, but  I’d seen her in photographs that barely contained her, such a wild thing, and I mean maybe there was something teeming underneath, but she seemed so tame.

Next day I went for lunch with kids from school and there she was, the waitress at the Chinese restaurant, all funny and friendly, her name tag said PEARL, we sort of unintentionally pretended we didn’t know one another, which was weird but I guess also true, she was nothing like the way she was at home, which was nothing like the way she was in the stories my mother hissed, which, it turned out, were mostly fiction. I mean the essences were true, the outlawness, but not all that excess property my mother used as moral ground.

Of course I also was nothing like the way I was at home.

She stayed with us, in the spare room across the hall, which was more silent than it had been while empty, it felt deeply mute but familiar, the way our house got when my parents traded wordless anger back and forth like a contagion.

But Aunty Pearl.

Like the sudden sophistication my mother wore into the velvety Saturday nights of my childhood, my Aunty Pearl wore a light-hearted enthusiasm into the florescent diner of my youth.

Somebody at school told me her mother got the receptionist job at Borden’s Dairy by pretending her name was ELSIE, like the cow in the Borden commercials, so I was on to Auntie "Pearl” immediately.

The restaurant, originally called The Oyster, was too high-end for our small working-class town – we grew up on Woolworth’s grilled cheese and pale fries – it lasted only six months before they changed it to The Pearl, and offered a limited Chinese food menu, run exclusively by locals, many entries were followed by an inked-in asterisk, I can’t remember exactly what the disclaimer scrawled at the bottom of the page said, something like *expect substitutions.

Aunty Pearl said things like what you thinkin’, honey? when she took orders, and ready darlin’? – she made jokes and suggestions and many friends – she yelled to the chef from a table one time Harry your mom’s here and you saw Harry’s head through the little window there all bald and surprised, it was hilarious, looked like his big happy face was on a serving plate. The Pearl soon became the busiest place in town, the strange menu caught on, Aunty Pearl wrote things like Chop Phooey, Egg Faux Young, Don’t Drop Soup, Cried Rice, on the chalkboard outside. When they weren’t busy, she dissected fortune cookies, with a ribbon she caught and pulled out the existing a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and folded in personalized ones she’d write on the fly your hair looks perfect today or dinner’s on the house or your waitress is mad about you.

Whatever people needed. Whatever she needed.

But at home she was quiet with brave edges, refined but not invisible, she talked to my mother with a crisp sort of impatience that made me bite my lip wondering who would be the first to blow.

A couple of nights after her arrival she came down to the kitchen when I was just standing there looking into the dark backyard and she said what are you thinking? I’m not sure anyone had ever asked me that question before, didn’t know if it was rhetorical, I’d been thinking about Nick from The Great Gatsby we were reading in school. We sat at the kitchen table for hours that night, and most nights thereafter.

I guess maybe she was both ways, quiet and thoughtful, wild and exhuberant, she was all ways. Still is. And so was I. Still am.

My mother, who meant to insult us in unison, kill two birds with her bitter comparisons and edited truths, is the one to credit, if that's the right word, my own brave poetic heart, if those are the right words. It was she who, anecdote by anecdote, formed the outlaw I longed to be, the very one I have become.

Auntie Pearl waited exactly two weeks before she told me the truth, she said it at breakfast one Sunday morning when we were all there, my father just stood up and left the kitchen as if somebody was calling his name, my mother didn’t say anything but was the first to fall apart. I went to her with, for the first time, unfiltered love. I understood deeply and immediately what her silence had cost her, and then I turned to Pearl who stood in front of the brightening window and I was not floored or flabbergasted, I was barely surprised, I think the outlaw in me knew all along she was my mother.

I know this story is maybe too short to support this sort of reveal, I know not enough time has passed nor enough pages for you to give much of a hoot about any of us, and mostly I know the word outlaw is not the right one for what we are but I like the way it sounds and am stubborn. And that’s the difference right there between me and Pearl – I still call her that – she keeps things internal where they brew into the most gorgeous poetry, and I let them out right away. Didn’t always. But my mother encourages it now. Since the release of her big secret, she is herself again, light-hearted and honest, the girl my father fell in love with he laughs.

What is flabbergasting is my mothers’ devotion to one another, all the tumbling love.

––––––––––––––––––––––––

Wasn’t going to include this bit because I like endings like that more than I like endings like this but like I said, I can’t keep much inside so here goes: There's something about when I say her name – stay with me here – when I say it super slow – P e a r l – (try it!) it feels like along with her name comes a real pearl, round and irridescent and beautiful, as if I’ve been keeping it under my tongue my whole life.

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The Antidote To Everything

Good morning. It’s Tuesday, smack the middle of September, beautiful here, I have a buggered shoulder right now due to competitive yoga, just kidding, mostly, but there is definitely a grain, a grind, of truth, and that’s what I did to my shoulder, I ground it.

My daughter informed me that we should all be able to do eleven push-ups, who the fuck comes up with these numbers, and I took on the challenge without asking my left rotator cuff’s permission, and in a hurried, maybe even frantic fucking plethora of Chaturanga Dandasanas I felt it go pythaaannnng and I think maybe I heard it, too, in the same way you hear calories burn, the little fuckers.

Excuse my language.

So instead of yoga I am doing physiotherapy with soup cans and balloons, walking up and down the big hill here to the lake, and not swimming. I just stand there and occasionally fall onto my back and squirm a bit, but these mid-September days and Lake Ontario are divine from that perspective, the trees getting a little rusty like me.

Here’s a story about hope. Also about its absence. Thanks for being here.

Again last night I got the nightmare in which I set my childhood table for three. I know it doesn’t sound like anything more than a dull dream but I woke up shattered.

After my brother Harvey went missing, we didn’t eat at the table any more. How could we? I am an atheist, mostly, but god bless any family who has lost a child, for vacancy is the most haunting thing of all – and I should know – all of my nightmares that summer featured vacancy in the shape of my little brother.

I was the nightmarer; he, the sleepwalker. He was ten the night he sleepwalked out the door.

Our back yard turned into a forest, then a cliff, then the lake. Everybody showed up to search for him in the tangled acreage – kids and teachers from school, my father’s coworkers, strangers from neighbouring towns, my mother’s sewing bee and book club – they even closed the Red & White, the cashiers were still in their uniforms, the sullen stock boys rearranged the forest.

I thought for sure we’d find him curled up in some frond like a Cabbage Patch Kid, it was too awful to consider the alternatives, so we went through every possibility in that forest and then every impossibility – we peered through decayed logs into which he couldn’t possibly have squirmed, we climbed trees completely inaccessible to him, we searched burrows too small and empty little nests. Our neighbours and friends walked hand-in-hand through galaxies of crocus that could not have concealed him.

I remember looking down the throat of a wild tulip.

Yellow tape crisscrossed the end of our lawn the next morning, we heard boats and voices and rumbles that made my body convulse in advance, before I was able to interpret them.

In a vacant moment, I imagined my police officer neighbour secretly catch and release my flopping brother like a too-small trout 

They dragged the lake for three days and then called it off.

People continued to search the 26-acre forest, every time I looked there was a flash of skin or plaid, an eyeball or eartwist, and every time I thought it was Harvey coming home. The mixture of hope and its absence was like dying, but the nightmares stopped – I think my horror receptors were full.

A few weeks later my mother caught herself setting the table, we all had our vacant moments, and she quickly positioned her sewing machine along Harvey’s edge of the table, spools of thread where I sat, a tape measure for her, a wide open pair of scissors for my father. After that she sat with her back to us, sewing seams of nothingness in front of the window while my father churned in front of the television. He signaled me when he needed more ice. I did nothing but play alleys on the carpet.

Between the whir of the sewing machine, the presence of ice in my father's whiskey, and Walter Cronkite's whispering doom, my alleys glided with careful velocity, and I listened for the door, for Harvey’s return.

People say it’s better to know than to not know and I heartily agree with this as long as the knowing is the good kind.

I tried to present both hope and no hope in this story so you could sample those desperate days of 1968, the year I became aware that each soldier on the nightly news was somebody’s brother.

It was Crazy Hattie Murphy who found Harvey wandering way down in Regency the morning after he walked off, he was awake but lost, he was only ten as I said, she took him home and fed him possum and dandelions – she was not like some kook from The Beverley Hillbillies – she kept him locked up all summer.

He escaped by mistake. There’s really not much that can deter the sleepwalking mind once it decides to go for a walk. He came back to us on a full mooned night in October, he slid silently through the door and to bed.

During our stand-up breakfast the next morning, it was a cool Sunday, he came down the stairs and stood in a pool of isolated sunlight.

I remember that moment above all moments. I think about it all the time. It is my antidote to everything.

TO ABHOR THE SEA

I went into the back yard to record this, it was very early, and cold, and spider-webby. I have a lot of shade in my back yard, and it’s filled with hostas, usually this is the time of year they bloom into little purple drops of loveliness all over the yard, but this year, we have deer, a mother and her polka-dot fawn who have rendered my hostas down to sticks of celery like at the grocery store. There are walnuts that come crashing down, big as apples, I gathered them one year but they’re not the eating kind, they were awful, so I leave them for the squirrels and to roll my ankles on once in a while.

I don’t have a middle name and every once in a while I think I might give myself one, haven’t yet, but the one I think of is Sea, and so there you have it, a shite introduction to this short story about the sea. Not crazy about the title tho… once a title establishes itself, and they seem to come without my participation, I consider the story either blessed by it or stuck with it. In this case, it leans toward stuck, but I am too stubborn to change it. I know this title makes it seem like I tried too hard but it’s the opposite – I left it alone – it’s called anti-editing and I’m a pro.

Thanks for being here.

You could sit and look past her, through the dark room and into the triangle of space where the curtains fluttered open, and you could see, in the shape of a sailboat, the sea.

I don’t know how many times I heard her say she hated the sea. I knew it had taken three of her sons, but to hate the sea, what I loved most, was incomprehensible.

The sea was all we had.

On my father’s fiftieth birthday, we – my parents, my brother Charles, and I – had come to her house uninvited, obliged. They dreaded it but I didn't. There was something about that sailboat view. She was not grandmotherly, not happy to see us, but resigned herself to our company and there we sat in the grey afternoon.

I abhor the sea, she said.

It was a new word for me, never heard it before and seldom since – she didn’t whisper it; it was more of a hiss– and then I got it, I understood, I accepted the carbonized version of hate she had for the sea.

One would not use the word beside to describe the proximity of her house to the sea, but against. The sea roared and the house roared back. When we drove around the final bend from which it was visible, it often wasn’t, there was a kind of felt in the atmosphere, each time we were suddenly beneath a compact grey residue, look what the storm dragged in.

The house itself was simple geometry, 90 degree angles of Irish concrete which wasn’t concrete at all, but a dried mixture of peat and pebble and a salty organic slew from the shoreline. If you looked at the outside walls carefully you could see little shells, sticks and pebbles – it was a masterpiece of discovery like looking into the night sky and always seeing something more – there were bubbly empty snakes and ladders of air where seaweed had decomposed.

The same view was available on the inside but in a form of braille, subdued beneath a layer of paint.

Charles once saw the fossil of a seahorse, he swore it, he said it was a perfect thing like the brass sculpture of a hummingbird our mother had on her dresser, the details excruciatingly organized, but when he tried to show me, he couldn’t find it.

For the rest of our childhoods he searched the sea-facing side of that eroding house in a quiet frenzy, I thought he was nuts, I noticed my mother’s worry vein pulsed as she told him again and again to come inside, but he never did. He later became an archeologist and pretended to search for history, but we all knew the intimate curl he was really after.

Through the triangle of light available from the curtain gap one could see in the Atlantic all the light in the world. There were clement days, but even then, the shadows.

I paced in the small thick room to give the sailboat motion and one day, in its shape, a man appeared, as if he’d climbed aboard. I moved closer, peeled the curtains up and away, everyone shied from the light, there were gasps, and then we all watched him.

He was not the old man and the sea one might expect, he was a young man, stooping, he didn’t notice the house or the growing triangle at first, but he soon stood up straight and faced us, hands pressed for a moment against his thighs, he took his hat in his hand and waved with it, I pressed my cold palm to the window and there was a pause, a moment of infusion that felt impossibly long. When I released my hand he made his way, slowly slowly slowly down the rocky shore.

My grandmother said nothing but I knew in my heart that she thought it was the ghost of her sons.

My father later, much later, decades later, said he thought so, too.

Our visits were different after that.

I’m not saying the weather changed, those coastal cavities in Ireland’s north have a way of catching storms and holding them tight, this effect is reciprocal, there is no such thing as change unless in the form of erosion, again reciprocal, but as I said things were different after that. My grandmother's curtains were not open as you might expect me to say, but gone.

Gave her hope my father said on the way home.

I turned and said to his eyes, big and crowded in the rearview, What do you mean? Hope for what? Her sons to come back?

No. Probably not.

What then? Hope for what?

But he didn’t answer, he adjusted the mirror, and I did not ask again.

So it’s become like a multiple choice in my head the various forms of hope.

The other day I was there again, the house is less geometrical now, it’s been decades, and time has allowed curvature into the mix. The cloud so persistent in my youth was there yet not there, worn and frayed and see-through.

I walked along the beach, I looked at the house, not through but at the window, it reflected the sea my grandmother had abhorred until she grew to love it again – and for a moment or forever – I was the man from that day, stooped and searching through the rocks.

I suppose archeology runs in the family. Charlie searches for his seahorse, my grandmother for her sons, I don’t search for anything that has identity, I just search.

a package from home

This is a short one, that’s how it goes some days, I never pre-determine the length of a story I just write until it ends, and sometimes the ending is served up unexpectedly, I don’t always bite, but this one seemed perfect, so I took it.

I used think differently, but brevity is not a cop-out.

Thanks for being here.

A Package from Home by Sherry Cassells

We’re more than a week in and people are still saying it’s already September as if there’s some injustice involved, as if it’s their first time around, as if they don’t have a calendar and nobody else does either.

I got a package from home yesterday, just call me Julie Andrews, it’s all brown paper and string but flattened under crisscrossed layers of packing tape, it’s the size and shape of a baby and the same soft fullness if you know what I mean – sorry, it’s too early for a good analogy – my name is messy but beautiful, my address blobby but neat, Aunt Grace still uses the cartridge pens of her youth, the ink’s black but feels green, letters like stems, she’s right-handed but her writing leans backward and it’s always been chunky and bold as if it’s trying to sustain its angle but now there is evidence of a struggle, it’s fainter and straighter and smaller, an airplane smokes through my head, I need to visit.

I know what it is, this hard/soft annual package – it is a carefully-folded hand-knit sweater in a shade of green – but I am at the moment without the courage to open it.

This is not exactly procrastination; it is self-preservation.

I know that semi-colon looks like it’s winking, as if to indicate there’s a bit of a joke there, but there isn't, there is a very real chance I would die from not a broken heart but a carefully folded one.