Short stories you’ll long for
Not sure if any of you ever go, but there’s a whole website attached to this story, you can click on my name up top if you want to look around. Close to the bottom there’s a section with links to some of my favourite short stories. I change them up once in a while because I have a lot of favourite short stories, and as soon as I get permission from T. Coraghessan Boyle, author of Chicxulub, I am going to swap it in. It’s a story I read in the New Yorker maybe 30 years ago and it’s stuck with me like the real Chicxulub stuck with Clayton Handsome Chayn.
Got a little fancy with the audio on this one, a number of things happened yesterday afternoon all at once, I was telling someone about my son’s handle when he DJs which is Turn!Turn!Turn! and I was just finishing off Chapter 4, right at the kitchen part, so that’s the song I put on the radio, why not, and I felt like listening to it so I did, and I noticed those lyrics and how they fit right into the story so I plunked them in at the end.
Here’s Chapter 4 if you’re following along and if you’re not, you can start from scratch here.
Thanks for being here.
I don’t know why in Canada's true north when we should have been learning about our home and native land, we studied everything but – The Balkan States, New Zealand, Japan, The Soviet Union – and in grade eight it was Latin America. I chose the Yucatán Peninsula for my presentation, I liked all the chewy syllables, and when I stood in front of the class it was its underbelly I talked about, the impact crater called Chicxulub, formed when a six mile wide asteroid hit southeastern Mexico 66 million years ago.
Think about that I demanded of my classmates and then slowly like air from a balloon I hissed six miles wide sixty six million years ago and my first stint at public speaking spiraled like the spent balloon, into constellations and galaxies and black holes. I roared, I spewed, I soared, the teacher gave me a D-minus, she said I didn’t even mention the Yucatán Peninsula once.
I carried that asteroid around in my head, always wondering whether any hurtling debris had made it through the atmosphere, and by the time I got to high school the shooting stars in question had come to rest as twinkling interior meteorites.
Plugging through the fields that day to get my shovel, Mrs. Field frozen at her clothesline as if she were hung there herself, again I thought of Chicxulub. How joined are the events of our lives to the earth and the heavens? I was convinced that beneath my field churned a miniature Chicxulub that housed a solar system of jewels, the former playthings of angel-children.
My shovel revealed many stones of no colour and little hue, I held them to the sky they only slightly altered the blue, some leaned bluer, some less so, a few gave a beautiful algaeic tint, one or two pinked like the air around my grandfather’s roses. I poured them into my shirt pocket, astounded when one of them slid straight through the fabric, I pressed my hand, both hands, firmly against my pocket and ran through the mud, squelching, this time to the barn where I placed them into a steel bucket of water and like the Alka-Seltzer® my grandmother used to let me plunk into her tea, I waited for the fizz to dissipate and then slowly scooped from the water to my lap the oddest of entities, some were like pale raisins, some soft pyramids, others thorns and teeth.
Suddenly Mrs. Field was behind me, she whispered diamonds, my love over my shoulder. She later told me she rushed over because she thought I was having a heart attack the way I ran amok through the fields clutching my chest.
I was living alone at the time, my grandparents had moved to South America for its extended growing season and superior wool, but one never lives alone on a farm, for the animals were my tribe, my ilk – two pigs, two ewes, two goats, two cows, two llamas, two chickens too many – you could call me Noah but for a single farting bull, who I called Frap, all of us animals adopted a toothy indignant grin whenever he blurted his own name.
Diamonds, my love.
The words on either side of my were as unexpected as what happened next, Mrs. Field took full and utter advantage of me right there in the barn, in front of my blushing tribe.
Our courtship was brief, by the time we left the barn in the morning we were already betrothed, when I said after you, Mrs. Field, she whispered, call me Daisy. I looked back at the animals, all heads were high, all eyes sparked at mine, Frap frapped, we all tooth grinned and chortled, Mrs. Field, I mean Daisy, included.
I had forgotten all about the diamonds, or whatever they were, until I saw them once again sparkling in the field, the field that could grow nothing, no stalk nor weed, yet allowed these marvelous stones to reach the light of day all of a sudden, but then it occurred to me also all of a sudden, that perhaps my grandparents had been privy to the field’s secrets, I mean how rich can you get selling roses to a loyal but small community. They’d sent me pictures of their new home in Montevideo, both of them strong, their skin rich from sunlight, they each wore a white knitted scarf which in the strong salty breeze shot straight out from their golden necks, their white hair also sideways, and the entire field of tall grasses leaned. All of these things pointed to their gigantic gemhouse which reflected sharply the South Atlantic Ocean, a moat of blood around it – my grandfather’s roses.
But back to my sister Daisy Chayn, we were in the kitchen, my happy wife made us blood pudding and eggs in our small kitchen, she butchered and cooked and gathered the eggs I could not, she turn turn turned with the Byrds on the radio. I’d had the picture of my grandparents enlarged and it hung on the wall beside where we ate. My sister Daisy rather drank her food due to the overwhelming braces, I was surprised she could hold up her head at all, the radio was coming in loud and clear thanks to her, and she looked at the picture. She pointed to what I thought was a flaw in the print, I must say it was so similar to the introductory flash I saw in my field I did wonder at first if my grandfather had tried a new sort of farming, my sister Daisy laughed, she chortled, she said look how my braces caught the sunlight you can barely see me!
And then I noticed the chain of pale raisins around her golden neck.
A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together
If you want to listen to that song a million times like I did, here it is.
Short stories you’ll long for
June 10, 2025
How do you speak in italics?
I think it’s clear when you read this one who’s saying what, that the italics represent the actual restaurant review, but how to portray that in the audio is beyond me, I thought of adopting an accent or introducing each bit of the review as a bit of the review but I decided to try some subtle inflections which are too subtle so you pretty much have to read along with this one so you know what’s what.
Thanks for being here.
Restaurant Review by Sherry Cassells
I just read the beginning of a restaurant review in which the writer said the one thing chefs have in common is a mother who can cook, so it is with a grain of salt I continue reading, it’s my restaurant this reviewer is talking about and my mother did not cook, she was too busy dying.
…the variety is endless, copious, the fusion of cultures otherworldly, and this comes from the pen of one who has known fusion cooking intimately...
Our neighbours cooked for us. They used to come and scoop me out of our flat, they coaxed me into their tiny kitchens and hours later I went home with a fully prepared dinner for three. I never left my mother’s side otherwise, everyone said she should be in the hospital but her illness went on for years and I don’t think hospitals offer that kind of residency.
...I cannot call this restaurant unusual, for it is deeper than that, it is abnormal...
We lived in Belfast at first but moved to a flat in Derry after she got sick, we needed a less expensive place, a cheap place – it was costing everything my father made and then some to keep my mother alive. She was grateful of course but I heard her whisper sometimes, Tommy my love, it’s good money after bad, a saying I didn't understand, but I liked the sound of the first bit, Tommy my love.
...The beloved crispy halibut of England, mine this day is fried darkly, perfectly, and placed on my plate the shape of the continent itself – wait, is this purposeful? – and in place of Ireland and the French fried potatoes I expect is a mound of curried mash, and we have above Scotland a bright hat of frozen mango slices, beautifully transparent, like so many feathers…
Water comes to my mouth when I think of the hallway around the corner where the Sanyal’s apartment was, permanently infused with the strong yet soft scent of Kari, Mrs. S wrote the word out for me, and beside it she wrote curry and then crossed it out, on my menu I have done the same, all curry dishes are Kari with her capital K. In her mango-coloured kitchen she taught me the strategy of Indian spices and flavours, we baked bubbly naan that reminded me of roasted marshmallows, she taught me the specific chemistry of different rices, she spelled each out for me and I serve them spelled the same way, I pretend to take note when the correct spelling is offered.
...the sushi, too, is divine, almost excessively so, for should I close my eyes I feel I might open them again in a strange city, beneath a new sky, and hardly myself...
Mr. Sasabuchi across the hall and down one taught me the sticky kind of rice, it was tricky but I learned over time, he said to never rush but be quick quick quick, he infused me with patience, he said chefs in Japan are required to spend many years learning to perfect rice. I intuitively understood this kind of devotion. Mrs. Sasabuchi pickled things, unidentifiable things like knuckles bobbed in jars in their refrigerator until barely-there slices were served by themselves on a very big black plate. They didn’t – wouldn’t – tell me what the meat was, I pickle the same way now, I plunk all kinds of joints and bones and sinew in jars, they have a fridge of their own, yet I have so far not achieved the flavour that came from Mrs. Sasabuchi’s jars. I serve mine as appetizers on rather unwieldy plates, I call the dish Pickled Sasabuchis, when people ask me what’s the meat I smile like she did, and giggle into my hands.
…the simplicity of the Italian food is to be celebrated. Each menu item, such restraint to offer only three, listed without ado as Spaghetti, Ravioli, Cannelloni and I am beguiled, speechless, I can offer no more than these two grateful sentences: I finished my Ravioli with deep regret. This type of food gets into your soul.
The Italian family lived loudly at the end of the hall. Mama G had three sons and a daughter Francesca who was sweet on me when we were children, she tortured me throughout my adolescence, she is my wife today. We sing together in the kitchen when we cook, we fuse.
… every restaurant strives for a unique quality but Tommy My Love’s specialness is not contrived nor is it singular, what is remarkable is that it feels so natural one barely notices…
My mother was dying all my life and she finally did, unceremoniously, no final words, nothing, her life was over.
… that after such a remarkable meal, one which I ache to experience again, no dessert is offered, only a rather abrupt goodbye.
Short stories you’ll long for
Hope you don’t mind that I am experimenting on you but I am. Backstory can be a drag, it’s necessary but it can hamper the swing of a story. I’ve written pieces where I list everything you need to know point form at the beginning, like you can get away with doing in a play, you just say what’s what, but I’m trying it a different way here. All of the Next Door series are experimental, and none of them are perfect. Pretty sure you haven’t read anything like them before. I haven’t. These chapters take on a shape of their own, I just come to my keyboard these early mornings and start in a mad hatter sort of way, usually while I look out the window.
Enjoy your day. You can hear the early birds in the recording…
THE FIELDS NEXT DOOR by Sherry Cassells
CHAPTER 3
Some days you can unravel forever. Wait. My wooly grandmother used to joke about unravelling as in going crazy. I’ll try that again. You can unravel some days forever.
Once in a while I have a dream in which an entire lifetime is lived overnight like gulping down a whole-life novel. Maybe you’ve had dreams like this, too, I don’t know if they are for everyone. The me in these dreams is only slightly the me that I am, and I remain this other me upon waking, until I am absorbed, and I don’t mind saying sometimes reluctantly, back into my own skin.
That’s what the day in the field was like, and when I remember it, I am not sure I was on that day the me that I am when I am me.
Still with me?
That day was full, endless, page after never-ending page.
I hope the distant souls in the permanent folds of dementia are quietly unravelling days and nights such as these.
One of Mrs. Field’s sons lived in town and that very morning he had delivered to his mother her mail, and there was an imposter in the mix, a letter addressed to me, and she learned my last name was not that of my grandparents but that of my mother, her maiden name Chayn, a variant of the Irish surname MacSeain, meaning "son of John".
Come with me while I digress a moment, let’s talk about falling in love, a term which indicates a certain trajectory that I have trouble with.
I cannot distinguish between varieties of love, its many splendours are but one to me, there is no difference the love I feel for breakfast when I am hungry, a breeze when hot, happiness on a forlorn day, my dog Blue, a well-structured bloom. And so when Daisy, Mrs. Field’s name was Daisy, when she told me she had fallen in love with me that day, I felt a variety of misgivings, perhaps I had piqued her curiosity but how on earth her heart?
For years I wondered what made her fall in love with me, what took her so long and yet why so suddenly. My circumstances were not yet influenced by the absence or the presence of giant gemstones, and I did not arrive at the solution until she was my wife of several months.
(The gemstones are rolling around in my mouth but in the name of good storytelling I must keep them out of your reach a little longer.)
I was passing through the kitchen when her same son Simon came with the mail, our mail, and for the first time she saw her new name in the little glass window. Mrs. Daisy Chayn. Never had I seen her more delighted. I stood a moment speculating upon the name of her first husband – and if you’ll allow a sloppy homonym his name was Barry Field, and he was – but that matter aside you can see why she married him once you know why she married me.
I finally understood the nature of her love for me as it began, and since it had grown into something quite else by that time, I hooted at the revelation, unable for the moment to tell her what was so funny. Our love, very different from the love I have for everything else, began with the possibility of a most lyrical name. Mrs. Daisy Chayne.
Jesus Christ that was a long story, or maybe I just told it long, but the real story in this chapter is the discovery of another homonym, sorry I know you were gunning for the gemstones.
I had not seen my parents since I moved from their house to the farm when I started high school, I knew nothing of their lives, they wanted nothing to do with we three oddballs, but there came a day the summer after Daisy and I married – these backstories are killing the momentum – but I must tell you we lived in Daisy’s house so The Fields Next Door were my own fields, I wasn’t sure how I would manage the left tilt, but the transition was natural as could be.
There was a knock on the door, my eyes darted left, I opened the backwards door – here we go again but you see everything was backwards in Daisy’s house due to the overwhelming lefthandedness of its previous occupants – I opened the door to the left and there stood a wide-eyed girl, she was wearing a seersucker dress, disheveled, like when the vertical hold is making wild patterns on the tv, there were heavy-duty braces on her teeth and she sprayed words at me, none of which I could properly hear, she was crying at the same time, she looked rather mechanical.
I’d been watching television, or trying to, the reception was always shit, and when I invited the poor thing inside and directed her wobbly to the couch, the picture steadied immediately – she was an antennae – I saw for the first time Elly May Clampett clearly, oh my, it pained me when my wife came in and snapped it off.
This strange girl cleared her strange throat and wiped her strange nose on her seersucker shoulder. She then revealed herself in a series of mad hiccups to be my sister, Daisy Chayn, and if that’s not the homonym of the century, I’m not Clayton Handsome Chayn.
Short stories you’ll long for…
You gotta remember your lies when you’re a fiction writer, I mean talk about tangled webs, it’s one long, elaborate lie after another.
There’s something wonderfully devious about writing stories – especially in first-person – it’s like acting. It’s all about pretending and it’s glorious.
This one’s short and sweet and I hope a little haunting, not in a eerie way, but in a stick-with-you kind of way, maybe you’ll get a ripple of it later on in the day.
That’s what it’s all about, giving you that ripple.
I’ll be back in a couple of days with Chapter 3 of The Fields Next Door that weird little story full of homonyms. You can read the first two chapters now if you like, click on my pink name above and you’ll see the cover, also weird.
Thanks for being here.
The Christo Apartments by Sherry Cassells
I passed her building again yesterday on the train. It’s wrapped like a Christo – do you know Christo? – it's been in this state I don’t know how long, I hardly ever go downtown any more, this corridor it's like a slum now.
I used to text her and she’d fly out her back door onto the fire escape wearing something Zsa Zsa and wave and then she’d fold her hands over her heart and stand there like a kite. Same thing after work except she was dolled up, it was like looking at the Queen on a penny when the sun hit her face, her feet little golden triangles, we did this for twenty years.
I met her at a grocery store where I worked when I was 17. I was filling in at the checkout, afraid of being caught by the guys at school who would make fun of such a thing, and Doris, her name was Doris, she was a customer. She said you remind me of someone and I smiled, I said John Travolta? and she laughed, she said no, you remind me of my hairdresser, Millie and I said oh! Millie’s my mom and that’s how I found out she was sick, Doris said oh I’m so sorry and I didn’t say about what I just smiled the flat kind, and rang her through.
Next time I saw her was the funeral. She'd been studying under my mother and she took over the salon and that was it for maybe five years until she decided to retire due to sore feet, she still had my number and she called to give me some things she’d found while packing up, she said maybe there’s more and there was, she called again and I went to pick a few boxes up at her apartment, we went onto her little fire escape and smoked, the train went by and I said oh that’s the train I take to work and she said text me next time and I’ll come out and wave.
I thought it was cute and funny, and I said okay, and on Monday that’s what I did, and like I said we kept it up for twenty years and it’s strange, but I developed a love for her, a true love, based on gesture and movement, her increasing flamboyance, and trust.
I only realized yesterday passing by the apartment again that my love for Doris had been immense and unruly, like the giant swaying Christo ghost, and it had been entirely reciprocated, a beautiful silent thing, it was the most unconfined love of my life.
Short stories you’ll long for.
The Fields Next Door by Sherry Cassells
CHAPTER 4
I don’t know why in Canada's true north when we should have been learning about our home and native land, we studied everything but – The Balkan States, New Zealand, Japan, The Soviet Union – and in grade eight it was Latin America. I chose the Yucatán Peninsula for my presentation, I liked all the chewy syllables, and when I stood in front of the class it was its underbelly I talked about, the impact crater called Chicxulub, formed when a six mile wide asteroid hit southeastern Mexico 66 million years ago.
Think about that I demanded of my classmates and then slowly like air from a balloon I hissed six miles wide sixty six million years ago and my first stint at public speaking spiraled like the spent balloon, into constellations and galaxies and black holes. I roared, I spewed, I soared, the teacher gave me a D-minus, she said I didn’t even mention the Yucatán Peninsula once.
I carried that asteroid around in my head, always wondering whether any hurtling debris had made it through the atmosphere, and by the time I got to high school the shooting stars in question had come to rest as twinkling interior meteorites.
Plugging through the fields that day to get my shovel, Mrs. Field frozen at her clothesline as if she were hung there herself, again I thought of Chicxulub. How joined are the events of our lives to the earth and the heavens? I was convinced that beneath my field churned a miniature Chicxulub that housed a solar system of jewels, the former playthings of angel-children.
My shovel revealed many stones of no colour and little hue, I held them to the sky they only slightly altered the blue, some leaned bluer, some less so, a few gave a beautiful algaeic tint, one or two pinked like the air around my grandfather’s roses. I poured them into my shirt pocket, astounded when one of them slid straight through the fabric, I pressed my hand, both hands, firmly against my pocket and ran through the mud, squelching, this time to the barn where I placed them into a steel bucket of water and like the Alka-Seltzer® my grandmother used to let me plunk into her tea, I waited for the fizz to dissipate and then slowly scooped from the water to my lap the oddest of entities, some were like pale raisins, some soft pyramids, others thorns and teeth.
Suddenly Mrs. Field was behind me, she whispered diamonds, my love over my shoulder. She later told me she rushed over because she thought I was having a heart attack the way I ran amok through the fields clutching my chest.
I was living alone at the time, my grandparents had moved to South America for its extended growing season and superior wool, but one never lives alone on a farm, for the animals were my tribe, my ilk – two pigs, two ewes, two goats, two cows, two llamas, two chickens too many – you could call me Noah but for a single farting bull, who I called Frap, all of us animals adopted a toothy indignant grin whenever he blurted his own name.
Diamonds, my love.
The words on either side of my were as unexpected as what happened next, Mrs. Field took full and utter advantage of me right there in the barn, in front of my blushing tribe.
Our courtship was brief, by the time we left the barn in the morning we were already betrothed, when I said after you, Mrs. Field, she whispered, call me Daisy. I looked back at the animals, all heads were high, all eyes sparked at mine, Frap frapped, we all tooth grinned and chortled, Mrs. Field, I mean Daisy, included.
I had forgotten all about the diamonds, or whatever they were, until I saw them once again sparkling in the field, the field that could grow nothing, no stalk nor weed, yet allowed these marvelous stones to reach the light of day all of a sudden, but then it occurred to me also all of a sudden, that perhaps my grandparents had been privy to the field’s secrets, I mean how rich can you get selling roses to a loyal but small community. They’d sent me pictures of their new home in Montevideo, both of them strong, their skin rich from sunlight, they each wore a white knitted scarf which in the strong salty breeze shot straight out from their golden necks, their white hair also sideways, and the entire field of tall grasses leaned. All of these things pointed to their gigantic gemhouse which reflected sharply the South Atlantic Ocean, a moat of blood around it – my grandfather’s roses.
But back to my sister Daisy Chayn, we were in the kitchen, my happy wife made us blood pudding and eggs in our small kitchen, she butchered and cooked and gathered the eggs I could not, she turn turn turned with the Byrds on the radio. I’d had the picture of my grandparents enlarged and it hung on the wall beside where we ate. My sister Daisy rather drank her food due to the overwhelming braces, I was surprised she could hold up her head at all, the radio was coming in loud and clear thanks to her, and she looked at the picture. She pointed to what I thought was a flaw in the print, I must say it was so similar to the introductory flash I saw in my field I did wonder at first if my grandfather had tried a new sort of farming, my sister Daisy laughed, she chortled, she said look how my braces caught the sunlight you can barely see me!
And then I noticed the chain of pale raisins around her golden neck.
A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together
If you want to listen to that song a million times like I did, here it is.
Short stories you’ll long for.
THE FIELDS NEXT DOOR by Sherry Cassells
CHAPTER 1
My grandfather was barely a farmer. He preferred house plants.
During the winter months while my grandmother embroidered her way to heaven he learned to Frankenstein cacti. I was a childhood insomniac, I spent weekends at the farm and sometimes I’d get up in the night and I’d catch his monsters blooming. Some flowered for only a few seconds, others a minute or two, it was brief and gruesome and beautiful.
He was always watching them, too, my fellow insomniac said he’d never missed a bloom, he waited in tearful delight. My grandfather never cried but for joy, and I have the same thing, equal and opposite, I laugh at sorrow. I am a nightmare, watch out.
My parents thought my grandparents were ridiculous, my mother admitted that she barely loved them, I am unsure if love can be modified by the word barely, I think it is love or it is not love, she said it was due to convention and obligation that she visited them at all, my father said they were harmless, he insisted they were harmless, but he later changed his mind, he said they had inflicted emotional damage on their only daughter, he said that his wife could barely love.
Whatever afflicted my grandparents afflicted me in equal measure, our kinship was undeniable, we squinted and stuttered and occasionally limped, we were insomniacs. While my grandfather and I watched the cacti, my grandmother spun wool in the corner, I remember the sound felt like the gears in my head, we were all allergic to dew and lint – and I realize only just now – perhaps prone to hypochondria. My mother pointed out that my weirdness, her word, was an enhanced version of theirs, more aggressive she said sweetly. I knew the sweetness was a put-on, she didn’t love me either.
On one side of the living room my grandmother embroidered like breathing, she dragged her home-spun wool through square holes, her arm exaggerating the loop, inhaling and exhaling, the occasional cough at a thick bit, she looked like a medieval surgeon. My grandfather on his side of the room practically levitating with delight, slicing his juicy monsters together, peering through a series of magnifying glasses that hung from the ceiling by strands of wool, they sent bubbles of light twirling about the room, perfect bright circles slid over my grandmother, I could feel them on my back. His abominations gnarled on the windowsill stabbing the winter sky, I half-expected it, the sky I mean, to burst and slip away, revealing sleepy galaxies.
She embroidered sentence fragments from the Bible, she stitched over her own penciled-in cursive upon burlap stretched over the skeleton of a collapsible dinner tray, her fork a needle her needle a fork, she picked around the edges of each word, pick pick pick, and then she filled them in, with gusto, PICK PICK PICK, her arm pumping the corner of my wide eye.
I didn't know how my grandfather maintained such a level of calm, how he was able to sit perfectly motionless and watch nothing slowly happen as his grafts took or did not take, he told me he was able to control his pulse, he said he could hold his breath for fourteen and a half minutes, that his heart beat in threes. I imagined a barely there waltz beneath his plaid pyjama pocket.
My grandmother did not have the stamina her husband did, she became bored of her work, I could never understand the words she chose, I mean if you had to pick a sentence from the Bible you would want to pick one with some oomph, but hers were dull and common – Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! – is it any wonder she never finished a piece before she started the next.
We used the incomplete as tea towels, the unstitched burlap eventually frayed away, little licks of it down the sink, between our cushions and toes, my father used them in the soil to retain moisture. A select few of the embroidered words remained intact, I scrubbed pots and dishes with Bible words such as behold wicked praise father, I don’t know why only the six letter words survived.
She eventually switched to Mr. Rogers quotations and my grandfather switched to roses, I could leave it at that but I feel the truth coming on, I used to lie and hide and execute enormously long and earnest stints with normalcy, I was good at it but it was unfulfilling and always ended in disaster.
As I said I am a nightmare.
What began my transformation into an honest farmer was the first quote she ever finished, she framed it and banged it into my bedroom wall: The greatest gift you can ever give is your honest self.
So here fucking goes.
It’s barely raining, just a whisper over the fields.
I inherited the farm and an inability to run it.
CHAPTER 2
When in a contemplative state, I contemplate to the right. When I walk – and I can see the worn evidence in the fields and along my favourite pathways – I veer to the right. I tilt. My head tilts further, it must look as if I am listening to my shoulder or tuned in to the ground. Like fucking Rain Man. I half-worry that this has caused a curvature in my spine, ever since the Fields moved in next door with their sparkling aura, happy families are my lop-sided Achilles, my wayward Icarus, do their fields grow greener taller richer from love?
I pine. I long. My fields are a flop.
Yet the gardens around the house are glorious, the roses my grandfather crafted almost gruesome with vitality, he could never get them anything but red, when you touch a petal it feels as if you might break skin – what if they are haemophiliac roses? – the beds around the house would look like the hallway in The Shining. Surprising how they are to the touch, they are not the velvet your fingers expect, there’s meat there, that’s the cacti influence of course, and a bit of salt. I didn’t know for a long time that he watered them with a portion of his own tears. I maintain this practice but use table salt.
My grandmother dyed her wool, my grandfather as I said used it in the soil, and still I see colourful worms of it, the birds see it, too, the nests around here are chromatic and the birds orderly, the ones who have made a blue nest keep it blue and likewise for the greenish goldish purplish, the ish due to the seeping dirt, it washes away eventually, colours are peculiar, the blue is never ish.
Mice don’t give a rat’s ass, their bedding quilted in all colours, muted and permanentish.
Jesus I bet you hope I drop that one, I do tend to tend, to fixate, hence the rightness like a magnet, the pull of the Field’s fields – homonyms can be tricky hope you’re okay – the way I write this story down these early mornings it feels as if there’s a weight to the words, as if the page can only handle so many, some days can take more than others. I do not know upon what hangs this balance. I can feel when it’s about to give, I have to carefully finish a thought, the sudden economization not poetry but not not poetry either, and then it says WHEN!
This is a story of my farming years, my barren fields, they were my grandfather’s barren fields before me, he had the soil tested, he studied it, he asked the Quaker guy who bought from neighbouring farms what the problem might be and the Quaker guy, the buyer, said he hadn’t a clue. My grandfather paid for another Quaker guy to come out and assess, the guy said he didn’t understand it, the soil was exactly the same as everywhere else in the region, there were no extraordinary parasites. Have you ever seen soil under a microscope? I would never say those bearded squirms were ordinary. He said maybe it’s the water, but the rain was so plentiful there was no need for watering, but the Quaker guy said the neighbours watered, so my grandfather put in a system, good thing his roses had caught on my then, everybody wanted them like sturdy pets. The water system made some beautiful rainbows, my grandmother said they weren’t the wishing kind, the fields did not improve, could not even cough out a weed.
But they coughed out something else one day, I was on the porch veering, Mrs. Field was living alone by then, she hired me to care for her fields and if that’s not an extension of faith what is, something caught my left eye – I feel a WHEN! coming on – a wink of light from my field, I ran through its failed furrows in a bare foot curve toward the clean and sparkling tip of a jewel, I tried to pick it up believing at the moment it had fallen from a careless beak but it would not budge, I could not determine its colour the sun was so attached to it, my saturated retina held the image and flashed it throughout the field, I waited for this effect to fade but it did not, what I thought were afterimages were actual sparks indicating more jewels. I ran for my shovel, my feet sinking into and pulling out of the mud so rudely and so loudly Mrs. Field, who was hanging laundry next door, stopped mid-swoop and looked my way.
She later said that’s when she fell in love with me but I have to wonder, I mean if you pull that sinking running frantic messy image to the forefront a minute it’s not very appealing is it.
I wonder if she loved me at all.
CHAPTER 3
Some days you can unravel forever. Wait. My wooly grandmother used to joke about unravelling as in going crazy. I’ll try that again. You can unravel some days forever.
Once in a while I have a dream in which an entire lifetime is lived overnight like gulping down a whole-life novel. Maybe you’ve had dreams like this, too, I don’t know if they are for everyone. The me in these dreams is only slightly the me that I am, and I remain this other me upon waking, until I am absorbed, and I don’t mind saying sometimes reluctantly, back into my own skin.
That’s what the day in the field was like, and when I remember it, I am not sure I was on that day the me that I am when I am me.
Still with me?
That day was full, endless, page after never ending page.
I hope the distant souls in the permanent folds of dementia are quietly unravelling days and nights such as these.
One of Mrs. Field’s sons lived in town and that very morning he had delivered to his mother her mail, and there was an imposter in the mix, a letter addressed to me, and she learned my last name was not that of my grandparents but that of my mother, her maiden name Chayn, a variant of the Irish surname MacSeain, meaning "son of John".
Come with me while I digress a moment, let’s talk about falling in love, a term which indicates a certain trajectory that I have trouble with.
I cannot distinguish between varieties of love, its many splendours are but one to me, there is no difference the love I feel for breakfast when I am hungry, a breeze when hot, happiness on a forlorn day, my dog Blue, a well-structured bloom. And so when Daisy, Mrs. Field’s name was Daisy, when she told me she had fallen in love with me that day, I felt a variety of misgivings, perhaps I had piqued her curiosity but how on earth her heart?
For years I wondered what made her fall in love with me, what took her so long and yet why so suddenly. My circumstances were not yet influenced by the absence or the presence of giant gemstones, and I did not arrive at the solution until she was my wife of several months.
(The gemstones are rolling around in my mouth but in the name of good storytelling I must keep them out of your reach a little longer.)
I was passing through the kitchen when her same son Simon came with the mail, our mail, and for the first time she saw her new name in the little glass window. Mrs. Daisy Chayn. Never had I seen her more delighted. I stood a moment speculating upon the name of her first husband – and if you’ll allow a sloppy homonym his name was Barry Field and he was – but that matter aside you can see why she married him once you know why she married me.
I finally understood the nature of her love for me as it began, and since it had grown into something quite else by that time, I hooted at the revelation, unable for the moment to tell her what was so funny. Our love, very different from the love I have for everything else, began with the possibility of a most lyrical name. Mrs. Daisy Chayne.
Jesus Christ that was a long story, or maybe I just told it long, but the real story in this chapter is the discovery of another homonym, sorry I know you were gunning for the gemstones.
I had not seen my parents since I moved from their house to the farm when I started high school, I knew nothing of their lives, they wanted nothing to do with we three oddballs, but there came a day the summer after Daisy and I married – these backstories are killing momentum – but I must tell you we lived in Daisy’s house so The Fields Next Door were my own fields, I wasn’t sure how I would manage the left tilt, but the transition was natural as could be.
There was a knock on the door, my eyes darted left, I opened the backwards door – here we go again but you see everything was backwards in Daisy’s house due to overwhelming the lefthandedness of its previous occupants – I opened the door to the left and there stood a wide-eyed girl, she was wearing a seersucker dress, disheveled, like when the vertical hold is making wild patterns on the tv, there were heavy-duty braces on her teeth and she sprayed words at me, none of which I could properly hear, she was crying at the same time, she looked rather mechanical.
I’d been watching television, or trying to, the reception was always shit, and when I invited the poor thing inside and directed her wobbly to the couch, the picture steadied immediately – she was an antennae – I saw for the first time Elly May Clampett clearly, oh my, it pained me when my wife came in and snapped it off.
This strange girl cleared her strange throat and wiped her strange nose on her seersucker shoulder. She then revealed herself in a series of mad hiccups to be my sister, Daisy Chayn, and if that’s not the homonym of the century, I’m not Clayton Handsome Chayn.
Chapter 4
I don’t know why in Canada's true north when we should have been learning about our home and native land, we studied everything but – The Balkan States, New Zealand, Japan, The Soviet Union – and in grade eight it was Latin America. I chose the Yucatán Peninsula for my presentation, I liked all the chewy syllables, and when I stood in front of the class it was its underbelly I talked about, the impact crater called Chicxulub, formed when a six mile wide asteroid hit southeastern Mexico 66 million years ago.
Think about that I demanded of my classmates and then slowly like air from a balloon I hissed six miles wide sixty six million years ago and my first stint at public speaking spiraled like the spent balloon, into constellations and galaxies and black holes. I roared, I spewed, I soared, the teacher gave me a D-minus, she said I didn’t even mention the Yucatán Peninsula once.
I carried that asteroid around in my head, always wondering whether any hurtling debris had made it through the atmosphere, and by the time I got to high school the shooting stars in question had come to rest as twinkling interior meteorites.
Plugging through the fields that day to get my shovel, Mrs. Field frozen at her clothesline as if she were hung there herself, again I thought of Chicxulub. How joined are the events of our lives to the earth and the heavens? I was convinced that beneath my field churned a miniature Chicxulub that housed a solar system of jewels, the former playthings of angel-children.
My shovel revealed many stones of no colour and little hue, I held them to the sky they only slightly altered the blue, some leaned bluer, some less so, a few gave a beautiful algaeic tint, one or two pinked like the air around my grandfather’s roses. I poured them into my shirt pocket, astounded when one of them slid straight through the fabric, I pressed my hand, both hands, firmly against my pocket and ran through the mud, squelching, this time to the barn where I placed them into a steel bucket of water and like the Alka-Seltzer® my grandmother used to let me plunk into her tea, I waited for the fizz to dissipate and then slowly scooped from the water to my lap the oddest of entities, some were like pale raisins, some soft pyramids, others thorns and teeth.
Suddenly Mrs. Field was behind me, she whispered diamonds, my love over my shoulder. She later told me she rushed over because she thought I was having a heart attack the way I ran amok through the fields clutching my chest.
I was living alone at the time, my grandparents had moved to South America for its extended growing season and superior wool, but one never lives alone on a farm, for the animals were my tribe, my ilk – two pigs, two ewes, two goats, two cows, two llamas, two chickens too many – you could call me Noah but for a single farting bull, who I called Frap, all of us animals adopted a toothy indignant grin whenever he blurted his own name.
Diamonds, my love.
The words on either side of my were as unexpected as what happened next, Mrs. Field took full and utter advantage of me right there in the barn, in front of my blushing tribe.
Our courtship was brief, by the time we left the barn in the morning we were already betrothed, when I said after you, Mrs. Field, she whispered, call me Daisy. I looked back at the animals, all heads were high, all eyes sparked at mine, Frap frapped, we all tooth grinned and chortled, Mrs. Field, I mean Daisy, included.
I had forgotten all about the diamonds, or whatever they were, until I saw them once again sparkling in the field, the field that could grow nothing, no stalk nor weed, yet allowed these marvelous stones to reach the light of day all of a sudden, but then it occurred to me also all of a sudden, that perhaps my grandparents had been privy to the field’s secrets, I mean how rich can you get selling roses to a loyal but small community. They’d sent me pictures of their new home in Montevideo, both of them strong, their skin rich from sunlight, they each wore a white knitted scarf which in the strong salty breeze shot straight out from their golden necks, their white hair also sideways, and the entire field of tall grasses leaned. All of these things pointed to their gigantic gemhouse which reflected sharply the South Atlantic Ocean, a moat of blood around it – my grandfather’s roses.
But back to my sister Daisy Chayn, we were in the kitchen, my happy wife made us blood pudding and eggs in our small kitchen, she butchered and cooked and gathered the eggs I could not, she turn turn turned with the Byrds on the radio. I’d had the picture of my grandparents enlarged and it hung on the wall beside where we ate. My sister Daisy rather drank her food due to the overwhelming braces, I was surprised she could hold up her head at all, the radio was coming in loud and clear thanks to her, and she looked at the picture. She pointed to what I thought was a flaw in the print, I must say it was so similar to the introductory flash I saw in my field I did wonder at first if my grandfather had tried a new sort of farming, my sister Daisy laughed, she chortled, she said look how my braces caught the sunlight you can barely see me!
And then I noticed the chain of pale raisins around her golden neck.
A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together
If you want to listen to that song a million times like I did, here it is.
Short stories you’ll long for.
Sometimes a good quote hits right between the eyes, you so totally completely overwhelmingly get it, you're suddenly soulmated. However. A number of problems present with my new soulmate, Oscar Wilde, who said, I was working on a proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
When I’m writing I forget everything else. I am doing it right now. I should be thissing and thatting but I am writing, and whatever this is, it’s at a pretty hot gallop right now and I can’t/won’t stop. I get sudden pangs that bring me up for air, sometimes all I need is a snack, other times it’s something due at work so a sort of superpower kicks in and I get it done, so far I still have a job and my house hasn’t been taken over by birds or bees, the grass is greenish and the chickens are laying.
Here’s Part Two of The Fields Next Door. I guess this officially makes it a serial doesn’t it? My aim is to write these so they can be enjoyed individually, so even if you haven’t read Part One, please, have at it.
The Fields Next Door – Part Two by Sherry Cassells
When in a contemplative state, I contemplate to the right. When I walk – and I can see the worn evidence in the fields and along my favourite pathways – I veer to the right. I tilt. My head tilts further, it must look as if I am listening to my shoulder or tuned in to the ground. Like fucking Rain Man. I half-worry that this has caused a curvature in my spine, ever since the Fields moved in next door with their sparkling aura, happy families are my lop-sided Achilles, my wayward Icarus, do their fields grow greener taller richer from love?
I pine. I long. My fields are a flop.
Yet the gardens around the house are glorious, the roses my grandfather crafted almost gruesome with vitality, he could never get them anything but red, when you touch a petal it feels as if you might break skin – what if they are haemophiliac roses? – the beds around the house would look like the hallway in The Shining. Surprising how they are to the touch, they are not the velvet your fingers expect, there’s meat there, that’s the cacti influence of course, and a bit of salt. I didn’t know for a long time that he watered them with a portion of his own tears. I maintain this practice but use table salt.
My grandmother dyed her wool, my grandfather as I said used it in the soil, and still I see colourful worms of it, the birds see it, too, the nests around here are chromatic and the birds orderly, the ones who have made a blue nest keep it blue and likewise for the greenish goldish purplish, the ish due to the seeping dirt, it washes away eventually, colours are peculiar, the blue is never ish.
Mice don’t give a rat’s ass, their bedding quilted in all colours, muted and permanentish.
Jesus I bet you hope I drop that one, I do tend to tend, to fixate, hence the rightness like a magnet, the pull of the Field’s fields – homonyms can be tricky hope you’re okay – the way I write this story down these early mornings it feels as if there’s a weight to the words, as if the page can only handle so many, some days can take more than others. I do not know upon what hangs this balance. I can feel when it’s about to give, I have to carefully finish a thought, the sudden economization not poetry but not not poetry either, and then it says WHEN!
This is a story of my farming years, my barren fields, they were my grandfather’s barren fields before me, he had the soil tested, he studied it, he asked the Quaker guy who bought from neighbouring farms what the problem might be and the Quaker guy, the buyer, said he hadn’t a clue. My grandfather paid for another Quaker guy to come out and assess, the guy said he didn’t understand it, the soil was exactly the same as everywhere else in the region, there were no extraordinary parasites. Have you ever seen soil under a microscope? I would never say those bearded squirms were ordinary. He said maybe it’s the water, but the rain was so plentiful there was no need for watering, but the Quaker guy said the neighbours watered, so my grandfather put in a system, good thing his roses had caught on my then, everybody wanted them like sturdy pets. The water system made some beautiful rainbows, my grandmother said they weren’t the wishing kind, the fields did not improve, could not even cough out a weed.
But they coughed out something else one day, I was on the porch veering, Mrs. Field was living alone by then, she hired me to care for her fields and if that’s not an extension of faith what is, something caught my left eye – I feel a WHEN! coming on – a wink of light from my field, I ran through its failed furrows in a bare foot curve toward the clean and sparkling tip of a jewel, I tried to pick it up believing at the moment it had fallen from a careless beak but it would not budge, I could not determine its colour the sun was so attached to it, my saturated retina held the image and flashed it throughout the field, I waited for this effect to fade but it did not, what I thought were afterimages were actual sparks indicating more jewels. I ran for my shovel, my feet sinking into and pulling out of the mud so rudely and so loudly Mrs. Field, who was hanging laundry next door, stopped mid-swoop and looked my way.
She later said that’s when she fell in love with me but I have to wonder, I mean if you pull that sinking running frantic messy image to the forefront a minute it’s not very appealing is it.
I wonder if she loved me at all.
Short stories you’ll long for.
Sometimes there’s an unexpected longevity in a short story and the thing becomes massive – I don’t mean on the page – but in the head. That’s what happened with this one. I didn’t even try to wind it down. I know when I’m beat.
It’s how novels happen.
But but but.
There’s no way I can take it on at the moment, I mean I have a job and am already juggling several too many writing projects, I am too busy to get gobbled up with anything new, I don’t see how I can possibly manage.
Except maybe another in the Next Door series – The Fields Next Door? – could be a family name or could be the fields themselves OR BOTH!
Good thing I work well under self-sabotage because I feel a serial coming on.
And so, as the narrator in this story – chapter? – so succinctly says, here fucking goes.
Barely Home by Sherry Cassells
My grandfather was barely a farmer. He preferred house plants.
During the winter months while my grandmother embroidered her way to heaven he learned to Frankenstein cacti. I was a childhood insomniac, I spent weekends at the farm and sometimes I’d get up in the night and I’d catch his monsters blooming. Some flowered for only a few seconds, others a minute or two, it was brief and gruesome and beautiful.
He was always watching them, too, my fellow insomniac said he’d never missed a bloom, he waited in tearful delight. My grandfather never cried but for joy, and I have the same thing, equal and opposite, I laugh at sorrow. I am a nightmare, watch out.
My parents thought my grandparents were ridiculous, my mother admitted that she barely loved them, I am unsure if love can be modified by the word barely, I think it is love or it is not love, she said it was due to convention and obligation that she visited them at all, my father said they were harmless, he insisted they were harmless, but he later changed his mind, he said they had inflicted emotional damage on their only daughter, he said that his wife could barely love.
Whatever afflicted my grandparents afflicted me in equal measure, our kinship was undeniable, we squinted and stuttered and occasionally limped, we were insomniacs. While my grandfather and I watched the cacti, my grandmother spun wool in the corner, I remember the sound felt like the gears in my head, we were all allergic to dew and lint – and I realize only just now – perhaps prone to hypochondria. My mother pointed out that my weirdness, her word, was an enhanced version of theirs, more aggressive she said sweetly. I knew the sweetness was a put-on, she didn’t love me either.
On one side of the living room my grandmother embroidered like breathing, she dragged her home-spun wool through square holes, her arm exaggerating the loop, inhaling and exhaling, the occasional cough at a thick bit, she looked like a medieval surgeon. My grandfather on his side of the room practically levitating with delight, slicing his juicy monsters together, peering through a series of magnifying glasses that hung from the ceiling by strands of wool, they sent bubbles of light twirling about the room, perfect bright circles slid over my grandmother, I could feel them on my back. His abominations gnarled on the windowsill stabbing the winter sky, I half-expected it, the sky I mean, to burst and slip away, revealing sleepy galaxies.
She embroidered sentence fragments from the Bible, she stitched over her own penciled-in cursive upon burlap stretched over the skeleton of a collapsible dinner tray, her fork a needle her needle a fork, she picked around the edges of each word, pick pick pick, and then she filled them in, with gusto, PICK PICK PICK, her arm pumping the corner of my wide eye.
I didn't know how my grandfather maintained such a level of calm, how he was able to sit perfectly motionless and watch nothing slowly happen as his grafts took or did not take, he told me he was able to control his pulse, he said he could hold his breath for fourteen and a half minutes, that his heart beat in threes. I imagined a barely there waltz beneath his plaid pyjama pocket.
My grandmother did not have the stamina her husband did, she became bored of her work, I could never understand the words she chose, I mean if you had to pick a sentence from the Bible you would want to pick one with some oomph, but hers were dull and common – Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! – is it any wonder she never finished a piece before she started the next.
We used the incomplete as tea towels, the unstitched burlap eventually frayed away, little licks of it down the sink, between our cushions and toes, my father used them in the soil to retain moisture. A select few of the embroidered words remained intact, I scrubbed pots and dishes with Bible words such as behold wicked praise father, I don’t know why only the six letter words survived.
She eventually switched to Mr. Rogers quotations and my grandfather switched to roses, I could leave it at that but I feel the truth coming on, I used to lie and hide and execute enormously long and earnest stints with normalcy, I was good at it but it was unfulfilling and always ended in disaster.
As I said I am a nightmare.
What began my transformation into an honest farmer was the first quote she ever finished, she framed it and banged it into my bedroom wall: The greatest gift you can ever give is your honest self.
So here fucking goes.
It’s barely raining, just a whisper over the fields.
I inherited the farm and an inability to run it.
Short stories you’ll long for
I said I wouldn’t post stories here that were longer than 750 words, I said I wouldn’t fuss over them, and with this one I’ve done both. It’s an attempt at improving the previous story, and I don’t know if it worked or if the optimist in me is lying again. Writing is a practice and I’m learning all the time, today’s lesson is that brevity is not an excuse, just because stories are short they still need to end gracefully.
Putting these stories up for grabs is both terrifying and exhilarating, I am convinced they’re excellent one minute and crippled by their faults the next – I’m never in between – I’m either Nina Simone “I decided that whatever they might think of me I was probably the finest pianist they’d ever hear, so I was going to present myself as such. I put on my best long chiffon gown” or Eeyore "It's not much of a tail, but I'm sort of attached to it."
So excuse me while I slip into my chiffon and record this story in one gulp. Thank you and see you next time.
I Remember Baltimore by Sherry Cassells
There’s something about the syllables in that sentence. I remember Baltimore. Like if you said it over and over it would tumble into nothingness. We used to do that with the word chrysanthemum, it eventually fell apart in our mouths, just a few abstract scraps of colour.
crumumsesanth
Baltimore is an eastern Ontario township, so let the spot in your mind drift to rugged and rural Canada.
There were falls in Baltimore, my mother remembered when they were real falls, before the damn dam, but when I was a kid they were just a beautiful little squirm of water.
We called them Rapunzel for the cascade of golden rock we climbed like a tower to our cave, we crouched behind the stream, such a surprising perspective – I never got used to it – it felt like prying. We stuck our tongues into the wet and caught it in our palms.
I remember Baltimore.
Can you stand one more?
I remember Baltimore.
Those false falls, Haskin’s Drug Store, Langley’s Grocery, The Read Bookstore – my friend Tillie’s grandparents owned it – she lived with them summers when we were kids. They sold used books and named the store accordingly, they corrected every person who pronounced it reed and almost everybody did, that’s what you get for naming your store a homonym.
Me and Tillie we used to ransack that town daily and lightly lightly every night Rapunzel.
Tillie Tillie Tillie
Last night I dreamed of her again.
What a strange thing it is to wake up with her on my mind.
There’s a storm brewing this morning, I can feel it, my centre of gravity is off, it’s one of those secret storms that send shifts of light you’re not sure you actually see, maybe it’s a fault of the eye, and the roll of thunder you also deny, maybe it’s your guts, or maybe somebody’s beneath your window calling without calling.
She used to roll against the house, the clunk of a shoulder, her flat shimmering back, another shoulder, a quick heartbeat, and out I’d tumble into the purple. She greeted me in vibrant silence – with an exuberance I’ve not seen since – until it came again last night like an elixir, and today I crouch in this purple dawn, the rain comes now, I remember Baltimore.
We invaded one another’s lives, I scoured her bedroom and she mine, I was too young to have any real secrets, a few forbidden candy wrappers in my wake, a permanently borrowed necklace, a specific meanness toward insects, some babysitting snooping and shame, lightly lightly, and hers were similar, softly shocking, they included real shoplifting, a harsher cruelty, and lies lies lies.
We bobbed in this slew of ourselves, our sinnish concoction of purged secrets, wobbly and malleable, almost liquid.
Tillie was pretty in a sophisticated way, she practiced in front of the mirror, she expertly revealed her sweet profile and learned how to work her eyes, I was raw and rogue, she said I was charming.
It was luck that we were neighbours. My grandfather had recently become old and frail, I watched it happen so quickly like frying an egg, we sold the house by the school and moved to the farm where my mother had grown up, my father assumed the overalls and the pitchfork, she started cooking and being annoyed, she wore her hair in a newly severe bun, think of the American Gothic painting and take maybe thirty years away, a ragged little me on my mother’s skinny shoulder and another me, newly brave, dug into my father’s shoulder on the other side of the frame.
First time I met Tillie she walked straight into our house, she was still wearing her school uniform like Wednesday Adams, she’d only just arrived next door, her suitcase flat on their driveway, she flung inside and sort of swam to him saying Leopard, Leopard, Leopard (my grandfather’s name was Leopold). She had no idea we’d moved in, she didn’t notice at first everything was different, there’s something about moving back home my mother said, you need to change things.
I don’t think she ever changed them enough, she could not relax, or maybe it was the death she fed every morning and tucked into bed every night, listening for its soft steps to the bathroom in the night, would it peer into her room or mine.
I was careful with my grandfather but Tillie threw herself against him, his limp arms went strong around her shoulders, she peered over his twisted wrists, I was eating egg and soldiers wearing pink pyjamas and reading a book fit for a simpleton, I felt six, she didn’t care, who are you her words poured out and mine poured out beside them. I claimed my grandfather, his granddaughter I said, and then my name, Claire.
She said nice to meet you Claire I am Tillie Townsend, here for the summer, every summer, I live next door, I hope our friendship will be eternal.
Like I said, or maybe I only thought it, there was something about Tillie that made me believe there was something about me, too.
Childhood sleepovers. Roll that one around a minute. Childhood sleepovers.
Tillie wore my pyjamas, I made pancakes, my mother yelled at me for the little dots of yellow on the counter top, that’s when in a nearly invisible way we starting setting traps that would make her jack-in-the-box – a stacked cupboard, a loose blueberry, a puddle – we waited but sometimes missed the results.
My grandfather had an ageless core, he reported her reactions softly, gleefully, without teeth. I noticed the crosshatched skin of his neck matched the plaid of his shirt, the stripes on his cuffs ran into the veins of his hands, he rocked not with laughter but with its absence, as if he could not find the guffaws he wanted, as if he had run out, his hands caressed a non existent orb that sat in his lap, he just couldn’t easily get a grip on joy, but it was in his eyes and I set these traps for him, sometimes at dinner he looked so sad across the table that I would drop my glass of milk, she said I’d made him choke. My mother did not know that was the way her father laughed.
Tillie experimented with makeup and clothes, I stayed the way I was in a sort of ambiguity throughout puberty, my mother was in a continuous smoulder about it, I was in the habit of wearing my grandfather’s plaids at the time, he left cigarettes loose in the pockets like bait.
We never talked about our lesser lives, the ones we lived apart, I knew nothing about Tillie, it was as if she didn’t exist but for the summer months of our childhood, our youth, her grandparents died the winter we turned 16, one at sunrise, the other at dusk, as if scheduled.
She came for the January funeral in the company of two nuns – she’s a orphan of course, my mother said – I had never seen those birds except on The Sound of Music, I went to the funeral and stood in true American Gothic style between my parents, she didn’t look up, the next day she was gone.
When people from childhood leave us we do not think they can ever come back, this starts with Bambi, and then we learn about wars, Kings who murdered their Queens, Joan of Arc and Hitler. President Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated on our watch, four dead in Ohio, the naked Vietnamese girl running from her burning village, and everything else that lurked behind Walter Cronkite’s shoulder on the nightly news.
There was no hope for hope and summers lapped on, one over another over another over another.
When I was 32 I found her, Tillie Townsend right in the phone book, and I called her, I couldn’t speak.
Claire, she barely said, it’s you.
Telephone silence is tricky, I don’t remember who finally spoke or what was whispered, but we decided to leave our past in the past, we make a pact, tearfully, a blood sister agreement, it was the only way to be best friends forever.
Now I am not so sure it was a mutual decision.
Climbing Rapunzel had been her idea, she suggested the havoc in town, the tricks and traps to exacerbate my poor unhappy mother, eventually alcohol and boys, and it was her decision to still our friendship.
I know I said I didn’t remember what she whispered into the telephone but I remember exactly.
You won’t like me now, she said, just remember Baltimore.
Short stories you’ll long for
After I finished this one the first time, yesterday, the narrator got in her car just before I got in mine, she was going to Baltimore, I was going to yoga, and sometimes yoga changes your mind. Turns out she doesn’t get in her car after all and I think she made the better choice, I mean there’s something about longing isn’t there, in life and on the page, it intensifies atmosphere and only the sharpest bits of jetsam get through. I’m posting this quickly before it rains because I think it has a soft intrigue right now, and hopefully, a certain grace.
Rapunzel Falls by Sherry Cassells
I remember Baltimore.
There’s something about the syllables in that sentence. I remember Baltimore. Like if you said it over and over it would tumble into nothingness, we used to do that with the word chrysanthemum, it eventually fell apart in our mouths, just a few abstract scraps of colour.
crumumsesanth
Baltimore is an eastern Ontario township so shift the spot in your mind to rural Canada.
There were falls in Baltimore, and you might think – and why wouldn't you – they were more than the beautiful little squirm of water they were. They were named Glory Falls long before the damn dam. I've no idea the strength of the water now – it's been seventy odd years – odd being an adjective concerning the word to its right. It's been exactly seventy years.
We called the falls Rapunzel for the cascade of golden rock we climbed like a tower to our cave, we crouched behind the stream, such a surprising perspective – I never got used to it – it felt like prying, we stuck our tongues into the wet and caught it in our palms.
I remember Baltimore.
It wouldn’t sound much different with a mouth full of marshmallows.
Can you stand one more?
I remember Baltimore.
Those false falls, Haskin’s Drug Store, Langley’s Grocery, The Read Bookstore – painted red for clarity – they sold used books. My friend Tillie's grandparents owned it, she lived with them summers when we were kids, they corrected every person who pronounced it reed and almost everybody did, that’s what you get for naming your store a homonym.
Me and Tillie we used to ransack that town daily and lightly lightly every night Rapunzel.
Tillie Tillie Tillie.
Last night I dreamed of her again.
What a strange thing it is to wake up with her on my mind. It’s only 6:37 and already I’ve lived those years again.
There’s a storm brewing this morning, I can feel it in my sternum, my centre of gravity is off-grid, it’s one of those secret storms that send little shifts of light you’re not sure you actually see, maybe it’s a fault of the eye, and the roll of thunder you also deny, maybe it’s your guts or maybe somebody’s beneath your window calling without calling.
She used to roll against the house, the clunk of a shoulder, her flat back, another shoulder, and out I’d tumble into the purple, she greeted me in vibrant silence – an exuberance I've not seen since – but it came again last night like an elixir, and today I crouch in this purple dawn, the rain comes now, I remember Baltimore.
.
MAY 14 – I feel about stories the way George Burns felt about coffee. He said every cup was the best coffee he ever had. I write these stories quickly, early, and I post them before the doubt comes, while I still think they’re the best stories I’ve ever written, before I want to edit the ending or add commas or question the weird bit in the middle which surely I would rethink if I gave myself more time. There is a possibility, a probability, that I would polish this little story out of existence, and it barely exists now. I record in one take as you can tell, while brave/delirious as you can also tell. So here, in its raw and final form, your new LITBIT.
Speck
You can never tell the size of a bird in an empty sky.
And you never know its velocity but I think it’s an infinite acceleration, birds must have some dangling matter that says when or they’d go straight into space or like Icarus.
It would have put the world into a spin if the newspaper picture Bobby altered ever went further than Fairmount elementary, he put a speck in the space above Neil Armstrong’s shoulder and don’t ask me how he did it but he loaned intention and personality to his speck, nobody once said what’s that it was so clearly a bird in the moonsky and it’s impossible to tell the direction of a speck but this little squish was definitely on its way to the nearest shoulder.
Nobody knew what to do with Bobby.
I learned to tell when he was cooking something up, he had a way of tilting his head like he was listening to far flung directions, my mother was confused and shocked at the artwork he came up with and she limited his alone time. She encouraged television and gave him a tray upon which to balance his dinner but he was watching those sitcoms without watching and I knew by the increasing tilt what stage he was at. Her plans backfired, his plans grew in scope and required extensive execution, he’d stay up all night in his room across the hall from mine, I’d get up sometimes and see the line beneath his door and although I was the one who burst through he burst bigger, his electric presence when he was in the process of making something, anything, it was the way they depict birth on those stupid shows, part agony and part something I could not determine.
I think now it contained a sort of indifference – a vibrant and saturated indifference – like deep space where nothing is everything.
My brother was the only true artist I’ve ever known, he tread so softly between normalcy and deviancy, lightly lightly, just enough, he joked when we were older, to keep him out of jail.
Not many kids slip by with their selves in tact, but Bobby sailed through the school system nobody said anything was wrong exactly. One spark at a time my parents without understanding accepted and supported him, my father finished the basement with surfaces all around the perimeter for him to work, and I don’t think Bobby ever slept in his bedroom again, it eventually became an extension of mine, I blinged it out and danced with my girlfriends, they were always going on about Bobby, I could feel their heartthrobs, an entire generation of small town girls dreamed of being in Bobby’s arms, content to be mildly ignored forever.
He was never one of those savants who can’t relate to others, Bobby was a popular kid, he was smart and athletic and funny and surprising, one night he turned not only my bedroom door upside down but my parents’ as well, my mother was famous for always waiting until the last minute to go to the bathroom, on trips she made my father pull over and she ran full speed into the bushes, she’d never had an accident until the morning her door handle was on the wrong side, she said you never knew what was what at our house.
His imagination –
I don’t know. Whatever space we have for imagination –
I don’t know if he had more space in his brain for the wild imagination it housed, or if less because it squirmed out and touched everyone.
You couldn’t unsee the things Bobby showed you, or unfeel the things he made you feel – nor did you want to – being with him was like swallowing lopsided gemstones I can still feel the sharp edges, other edges so soft they seeped. He was never angry and seldom disappointed. Later in life he lived in a sort of intentional poverty. During his sculpting years, and those were mighty prosperous years, he gave his work away, one piece alone could fund charities for a long time, my doctor recently revealed she had received a scholarship and was educated on my brother’s dime. He lived on couches and in slow-moving trains, he visited me once a year or so and stayed until he left, I know how that sounds but that’s how it felt, he was mine again for x and then so very not mine.
I didn’t start this piece with an analogy in mind, I am not one for such opportunities, the bird thing simply came to me when I woke up this morning, it was in my head when I made coffee how you could never tell the size of a bird in an empty sky, that’s all.
MAY 9
Do you think we can treat the time since my last post the way they do in the movies, you know, without explanation or excuse?
Okay great. Let’s do that then. And we’ll round down.
ONE YEAR LATER…
You know me, you know I’ve been chasing my cursor for a very long time – earnestly and in good faith, with gusto, consistency, humour, not enough commas except for here, optimism, curiosity, good intentions, persistence.
I WRITE MORE THAN I SLEEP FFS
Way more.
The page is where my me goes – that sounds nicely Spanish doesn’t it? – it’s where my ideas go and I think ideas are what make us us and when those ideas shift into words that hit the page just right, well, there’s nothing like it.
ALTHOUGH rECENTLY I DISCOVERED THAT Limoncello mascarpone cake comes pretty close
Why do I spend so much time at it you don’t ask?
I’m in full swing with legendary cellist Pablo Casals who said, when asked why he continued to practice at the age of 90:
Because I think I’m making progress
Welcome to Litbit. It’s about literature, mostly, and in small doses, mostly.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever.*
Take a look around – lightly, lightly – scroll to the top of the page and click on the pink LITBIT (you don’t want to know what spellcheck does with that).
Lots to read here – click on the bird and I’ll read you a story – and I’ve included links to some of my favourite short stories of all time, one of which my grade two teacher read aloud and it really got my 7-year-old heart pumping. Years later, like forty years later I think, I picked up a thin blue hardcover at a used book store, it was called How To Write Fiction, and I opened it right to that very story if you can believe it, The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant. And there’s one by Love in the Time of Cholera’s Gabriel García Márquez (swoon), another one I lifted straight from The New Yorker podcast, The Children’s Grandmother by Sylvia Townsend Warner will take your breath away, and a beautiful-in-a-longing-way story called Here I Stand Ironing by Tillie Olsen I can’t remember how or where I came across it but glad that I did…. these are totally gifts and you’re totally welcome.
I’ll change them up once in a while to give you some fresh nourishment.
You can read first chapters/intros of my three novels and the first bits of each of the NEXT DOOR series, and you can buy short story collections, individual short stories, novellas, plays – some are up now and some not yet . I just re-read A Carnival Ago and holy shit – did I write that? – it’s a tightly woven rather indescribable story, you’ll want to read that one, think I will serialize it, stay tuned. For now the novels are not for sale, they are to impress publishers mostly, I’ve made the first chapters available and I hope you give them a whirl. I’m a sucker for first chapters, they’re the reason I can spend forever in book stores especially when it’s raining out and also why I have so many books.
Did I mention I finally – and it’s taken oodles and gobs and scads of practice – but I have crafted the perfect comeback for rejection letters:
I’M SORRY but if your rejection letter does not hook me in the first sentence, I am simply not compelled to read on
But please, do read on. Read on and on and on.
and subscribe!
I won’t be using my old mailing list again so unless you’ve already done so, you gotta subscribe to Litbit now.
Look for the splat – it’s good luck! – and let me hit you up when there’s something new. Also you’ll be helping me look like I have a huge following or at least more than eight.
Used to be all you had to do to get published was write a really good book
Thank you!
*It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly… Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them… throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you… trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly… on tiptoes and no luggage… completely unencumbered.
– Aldous Huxley, from Island
okay I was gonna end it right there…
I’ve had this site ready to launch since Monday but I don’t know, something doesn’t feel right so I am going to make it right, I certainly don’t want you to think I’ve matured or anything, so perfect example it just occurred to me out of the blue that aliens might communicate in fart.
okay. that’s it.
I feel better now, as the alien said.
