This one is a case of cart before horse but writerly – it’s a case of cover before story – there’s a section on the website called The Serials Next Door, a collection of seven short novellas plus one placeholder, imaginary until today. I added it to appease my brain which prefers visual balance. So I designed the cover for The Widow Next Door, the eighth book in the series, before I started the story. I’m fond of the cover, so I had to write to story to fit, the house had to be concrete, with visible staircases, and there’s a spookiness to the cover so I made the story spooky, too, just a little for now, most of The Next Doors are softly spooky and mildly strange, there will be four or five more chapters. Feels good to write with restrictions once in a while, I usually am totally freeeeeeee, everything is winged, I wasn’t sure I liked how this turned out so I took the recording and went and walked up and down the beach a couple of times and listened. I recorded it in the back yard pretty early this morning because I like it when you can hear birds but there are two planes before the birds. Also. You know money has its own language, right? Good because I adhered to that principle, you’ll hear it, I meant to say languishing but said languaging, not sure why this happens, sort of an audio typo, a verbal glitch, the old deer in the headlights scenario, in this case I am the headlights.

And here’s a riddle, the   on y keyboard is issing. Autocorrect caught I hope all of the culprits but you might see some dangling hatter.

Thanks for being here.

The Widow Next Door – 1 by Sherry Cassells

I had lunch in a penthouse apartment overlooking the neighbourhood in which I grew up and now I think I know how God feels.

I saw our old house, the backyard that bit by bit and then all at once became forest. One September we discovered a monarch butterfly sanctuary back there and if there is a heaven after all this, it will almost certainly pale in comparison. I remembered it the other way, too, coming back home, the forest disintegrated into our backyard, I could feel my savagery flake away and obedience take its place.

 After lunch that day I drove past the old place, everything felt delicate and small, there was something of a carousel about it, surely it hadn’t been so orderly then. I think suburbia has got itself into a rut, it used to be colourful and now it is carefully bland. But still there’s a quaintness about it possibly due to the small houses, nothing like the monsters they build now, and it’s the time of day, too, there’s a lean of gold in the summer air, billowing shadows, enormous trees, a flock of starlings in the purpling sky, a train whistle in the distance, cicadas.

 I remembered who had lived where, their names through my head like birdcalls, then I turned down Windy Lake Road, the dead end street that led to the forest and eventually the bird cliffs and finally the lake where we spent our endless summers. Windy Lake. We used to steal the bottom sheets from our beds and toss them from the cliffs, they’d hump like airborne jellyfish, we tied carefully chosen rocks to weigh their corners down just enough, we'd head down to the beach where they'd eventually land and we’d climb back up to launch them again. I mention this climb casually; it was anything but. The cliff was sheer and often sandy, we shoved the toes of our runners into starling holes and held on to scrappy roots when we could. We did this five or six times a day, only once did I lose a sheet, it caught a gust and rose high high high, its stripes blended into the sky until it disappeared. Throughout the day I’d catch glimpses of it and get a wild sort of joy that it had escaped, that night I spotted it again from our backyard, a perfect rectangle in the sky. I wished it well.

 The houses on Windy Lake Road were a completely different sort, modern and huge – we used to say it was where the movie stars lived – they were built from concrete, flat roofed, with staircases on the outsides going from square balcony to square balcony like a game of snakes and ladders.

 The house second from the end on the left was for sale, the sign small, designed like an invitation, dark green with gold lettering. I parked in front of it. Talk about celestial it practically floated. I drove back to my apartment in the city and went straight to bed, that house orbited in my head all night. The next morning I called the number and put in an offer at asking price, I took the day off work so that I could worry freely, I drove there again that night and the following day the real estate agent called and I could barely say hello, she said the house had been taken off the market, I waited for the punchline, for her to say BECAUSE IT’S YOURS! but she didn’t, she offered no explanation, she just said she’d call if anything else came up.

 Maybe this is what a broken heart feels like.

 I try to console myself counting the ways in which the purchase would have ruined me, I build up a case of mold and rot, ruthless carpenter ants, dangerous spiders and bees sharpening behind walls, lurking raccoons, coyotes, drunken teenagers, vagabonds, asbestos.

 But I keep going back.

 And I keep turning down Windy Lake Road, stalking the house like a jilted lover, once or twice I catch sight of the owner and her shadow, I park at the end of the street and walk through the thin pathway into the bowl of forest before the cliffs – this route is too much for today’s children – the lake is beautiful in the moonlight, it looks perfectly round, through the bushes I catch glimpses not of the house I wanted but its neighbour, the one beside the forest, and surely the more valuable of the two.

 I grew up with parents who argued, I knew those silhouettes through the window with their gaping mouths, each night they carried on, occasionally struggling to the floor, my parents had not gone that far.

 Not getting the house had become an obsession, I decided to let it go, and on what was to be my final foray into the forest I saw the couple again. There was a violence to their shapes that had not before been present. When I heard a gunshot I'm ashamed to admit that the first thing I thought was that the house might go up for sale.

 It took three months but it happened. The agent called. She gave me the address and said meet you there this afternoon? I was early, she was under obligation, she explained, to tell me there had been a murder there, I pretend-balked, I continued throughout the tour heaving and recoiling sort of like the jellyfish sheets, my accountant said they might have trouble selling it, I got it for a song. My final condition was that they install new hardwood floors throughout, I didn’t mention blood but didn’t have to, and the entire place repainted, my final final condition was for new windows throughout, I said I was looking into hiring an exorcist but she was on to me by then, she said it wouldn’t bring the price down.

In the end I paid less than half of what I had offered for the house next door, again I sheepishly admit I felt no remorse for the circumstances that allowed such a steal, I was only grateful, I didn't care that my money languished in the bank account of a jailbird.

 There’s two of them next door. I thought it was just one woman and her shadow but it’s sisters. There are a couple of acres between our houses and I see them at night like Lady Macbeths up and down their staircases they go from balcony to balcony like they are chasing one another, like we did at the bird cliffs, I thought it might be a good idea to invite them for tea, I knocked on their door like some Victorian gentleman, they both answered and I handed them an invitation.

 They came last night.

 Forget the tea Connie said, she plunked down a half bottle of bourbon. I went to the kitchen for glasses, when I came back Stella was standing right where the blood would have been, she spun on the very spot and said with her arms wide I love what you’ve done with the place. I hadn’t done much, really, but the floors were dark and gorgeous, and the new windows, beautiful.

 I supposed they’d known their former neighbours, I was about to ask but Stella, she was wobbly either from spinning or bourbon or both, whispered, not to me nor to her sister, but with her arms wide, to the house itself, I used to live here.

pssst… if you want to see the cover go here and scroll down

I always talk about parts of fiction that are true and how writing fiction is an opportunity to store the past – or is storing the past an opportunity for fiction? Sometimes I plant things poignant, sometimes sentimental, I can blame my characters for any over-sentimentality, whether such a thing exists or not I feel I must apologize for it, this comes from growing up in a household where people ridiculed sensitivity – excuse me while I execute a short but meaningful raspberry at those hard-hearted few. Sometimes I hide funny things that are untellable in real life, due to lack of opportunity or guts, but characters can say what they like, and that’s the case with the tinnitus in this one – I was wondering why, during the multiple heatwaves we’ve had this summer, there are no cicadas when it hit me.

I was just getting the hang of Fahrenheit when they changed it to Celcius and I can’t get the swing of either now, and due to declined heat sensitivity – I practice hot yoga which is ridiculous and glorious at once, the temp in that room is like 40 degrees Celsius which means nothing to me – I suggest things like hikes or bike rides and everybody balks, not just the chickens, who, btw, I intend to rename because of this story, maybe from Love in the Time of Cholera.

Sometimes I try things out on my characters and their strange behaviour on the page encourages me to give their quirks a whirl, life is mostly in the bass and treble after all.

Thanks for being here.

The Shape of Me by Sherry Cassells

Last night Sarah said there was a hole in her life and I imagined it, small and shaped like me. I didn’t tell her about my holes like buckshot, didn’t tell her anything at all, she knew I was at work and unable to have a proper conversation. Sarah never wanted anything proper, nothing normal, I hung up and changed my ringtone to something deep bass.

Some douche was standing there looking at me like he couldn’t wait another second for his fish – oh hang on, that’s misleading – it’s not a restaurant but an aquarium where I work.

People say fish have a two second memory but it’s not true, they say a fish’ll see a piece of not food and go oh look, food! and then suck it in spit it out oh look, food! in out repeat but it’s only because, and this is not a hasty conclusion but one drawn after many nights of careful observation –  fish are optimists.

So this guy he says he wants a Molly, sounds like a drug deal I know, so we go to the tank all the velvety blackness swimming around it’s beautiful. I grab a net and close my eyes because I know these fish and I don’t want to play favourites. I don’t trust this guy. I get a lot of weirdos right before closing. What normal person buys fish at midnight? He says not that one; that one and it’s Marble he wants, everybody wants Marble, the only fish in the tank with vitiligo. I pretend I can’t catch him and I can see the guy moving for me, finally he says lemme try and I say can’t, not allowed. Marble decides to slide right into the net like suicide and still I don’t catch him, the guy hates me now, he says forget it, and when it's time for bed Marble’s gone, that son of a bitch took him.

If tinnitus comes in bass that’s what I’ve got, bass tinnitus, bassitus, I hear a deep rumble from those tanks all night even when I close the door, and tonight it’s tinged with Ozzy. My Aunt Lydia had the real tinnitus, she couldn’t hear cicadas in the summertime because she always heard cicadas, she said I wonder where all the hit bugs is Hanky, they musta shoved off, the rest of her hearing was stellar, my dewey footsteps across the lawn at two or whatever in the morning woke her up every time.

Some of the fish here are worth a bomb, there’s a three thousand dollar shark in the upstairs window, lots of rare beauties that are around five hundred a piece, and sea anemones, the colourful ones, they look tie-dyed, they’re three hundred dollars for one the size of your eyeball, there are these white sheets that sway like ghosts in the water for one fifty, it’s the exotic ones that the late-night shoppers want, they head straight down to the basement, nobody wants the common fish that hang like pasta in your tank.

I am the salt water guy in the basement under blue lights. 

Practically everybody is nervous when they come down, there’s a rhythm to the din like the Jaws music and those bits from Psycho, they’re not sure anybody’s down there and all the fish turn to them, openly aghast, the creatures without eyes move unpredictably, haphazardly, things spark and glow and ripple and shear. I wear black for effect, never the orange vest they recommend, I half hiss hallooow like Gollum, the fish are used to me, and the ones with lips sometimes work up a wry sort of smile.

I hang false NOT FOR SALE signs on the side-by-side tanks of our two Longhorn Cowfish. Despite their size and unusual appearance, they are peaceful fish with a calm temperament. They are solitary by nature, and are known to display friendly behaviour toward humans. They are yellow and rectangle, they look like how you’d draw a legless cow if you totally sucked at drawing, yet they are somehow haughty and elegant, their faces are intelligent, I believe them to be honourable and decent, I call ours Oscar and Wilde. They have pale lips, chins, and they love me.

Nobody knows I stay here, they think I go home and sleep and then come in early, they pay three hours of overtime every day to clean the upstairs display tanks. Soon as I find myself a place, Oscar and Wilde are coming with me. It’s July 25th now, I’m saving like crazy, we’ll be out of here the first of September.

I don’t think about Sarah until I’m in bed and the bassitus hits, she comes to me with elements of the blue basement atmosphere, maybe the way the midnight guys feel as they descend the stairs into the unknown where everything is strange with a beat of the supernatural, I am unsure the substance of her, I amwas not -lorn but uninitiated, she iswas my soft launch, we soared for a time and then were simply buoyant. I know how that sounds but what other words? She was so casual, too casual with it – I am not sure what I mean by it. I never knew how she could be neutral about something so grave – what is the something? I did not know that love – love? – is not so lumbering for everyone, for some it is light, for Sarah it ebbed and flowed like the ghost sheets, you never knew whether they were alive or simply matter up for disintegration.

When she asked me to leave I just sort of folded my life up and left. I’ve been sleeping here since, she’s starting to call again like always, pretty soon she’ll say come back like always, she thinks I’m living up in the sticks with Aunt Lydia where I grew up, she doesn’t know where Aunt Lydia’s is so she’s sunk about the little visits that come next.

Bassitus overrides my new ringtone.

Between shifts I am in the library reading books with characters that know what love is, I bring their worthy names into work with me and bestow the fish, I’ve recently named the shark upstairs Mrs. Rochester and the basement’s newest residents, a pair of flame angelfish, Jane Eyre and Edward Fairfax.

I never knew which petal from the daisy Sarah might pluck on any given day – would she love me or love me not? – she sucked me in, the little shape of me that is the hole in her life, and spit me out.

Immature love has a two second memory.

Sarah desynchronized my brain but I'm getting my rhythm back. I am redefining my shape. My fish optimism is ripening as is my sense of humour, yesterday I read Oscar and Wilde’s namesake and laughed so high Aunt Lydia wouldn’t have heard me.

I am going to work today, walking to the train soon, it’s early and lovely and quiet, birds in the recording, I’ll beat the rush and the heat, weird getting there so early though – the cleaning guy always gives me the same old joke and sometimes before he says it I offer it up, the reason I got out of bed so early – but I’ve got a lot to do today, the work-to-hour ratio I mention in this story did not come out of thin air, also I really am wearing a bit of a halo today, I mean this story is fiction, mostly, my sister is not even a little bit zombie and my brother is fine, but there’s always truth, and these stories are places to store it, truth I mean, the little bits of life that matter now. Thanks for being here.

Unless It’s Raining by Sherry Cassells

I pretended to be doing homework all my childhood but was really writing, didn’t do homework, and now I pretend to be working, they are paying me right now, so if anybody were to ask me if I make a living with my writing I could say yes.

At first I wrote poems, childish of course, about running away (why would I stay) and not having any money (just a jar of honey) but I soon realized that poetry is a vehicle for truth, it’s a metered release of the profound, and I started going all the way across the page with my bullshit, weaving tangled webs, without repercussion, my mother was an actress, my father an inventor, my dying brother, my sister a part-time zombie.

Always a grain of truth, sometimes more, my brother was dying. Wait. In case that makes you want to stop reading I'll tell you right now he did not die. He was not medically cured, he did not endure treatment of any kind, he just got better, exactly like he did in my stories, the symptoms stopped, his colour came back, I used every scrap of time I had to write him back to health, he started eating again, he stayed up late, he teased me, I nearly failed grade six, he grew seven inches that summer and joined the swim team in the fall.

This piece is for him. He’s been a little under the weather lately. We are middle-aged.

My sister has done magnificently well convincing everyone of her normalcy, she married my fiend Mike – there goes Freud slipping again – she has three little pains in her zombie ass. My mother is an award-winning actress, a master of disguise, her Oscars are in my father’s laboratory, he melts them down limb by limb when he requires their specific metals to conduct his secret electricity.

We talk on the phone my brother and I, probably all people can tell when the person on the other end of the line is tired or maybe congested, etc., but I can tell when my brother has had a haircut, I know when he’s hungry, I feel it when he’s wearing that old school sweatshirt he borrowed – stole – last summer when he came to visit.

I know his numbers.

I haven’t written this much since I was a kid, I am writing all the time, last week I work-worked only six of my 40 hour week, but I was brilliant, my concepts were approved by the client in a heartbeat, I am somewhat of a hero.

My laptop is overworked, too hot to put on my lap without a pillow beneath it, I type through movies and whatever my wife watches, she keeps reminding me to stop typing so loud but it's like telling somebody not to snore, my thrum resumes and she says it again, we ebb like tide and shore, my brother-on-the-page is improving, last night during Sex in the City I thrummed he took his kid out to a ball game. I called him today and there was a ticking noise in the background, I imagined him hooked up to some drippy medical device but when I said what’s that ticking, he said it’s Brad breaking in his new glove, I said what new glove, he told me he and Brad had gone to the game last night and Brad won a glove for being in the right seat, and a baseball with the Jay’s logo on it.

I said are you wearing my sweatshirt? It was rhetorical.

There was a thunder storm last night, true story, there’s a patter on the roof now, you can just tell it’s going to keep on raining, my wife is defrosting the fridge. Yesterday when I was writing very hard about the baseball game she said you can’t just sit and write all day, you know, unless it’s raining.

Wrote this first thing this morning then went for a paddleboard in WAVES so now my toes hurt from hanging on, but they hurt in a good way, not like my left shoulder that hurts hurts because I tried to do too many pushups in yoga, I know that’s not what they’re called in yoga but a pushup’s a pushup just ask my shoulder. All of that has nothing to do with this story which started out because I read some bird stuff last night and when I woke up I went straight to the empty page like a magnet. Thanks for being here.

Auntie Cupid by Sherry Cassells

Pigeons have magnetic crystals in their beaks that facilitate navigation, mine are not in my beak, but in the arrow of a pesky, loveless Cupid. The bastard shoots the idea into my head and next thing I know I am here. Once – I’ll tell you right now alcohol was involved – I woke up and thought I was on a bus going home but it was an airplane going home home – the first home in that charming duo is not actually italic, it is leaning, collapsing, due to the weight of all those years.

Aunty Jean out the lake used to say she was losing her marbles, she crossed her eyes and everybody laughed, her glasses were missing or sideways or Uncle Sad’s, that was an autocorrect, I’m letting it stand because Freud slips on typewriter keys, too, his real name was Syd.

One time Aunty Jean came to my mother’s birthday party in her swim suit, my mother always called it her surprise party, even when she had marbles Aunty Jean cut her hair in a style we referred to as startled. When it became apparent she really was losing her marbles Uncle Sad said don’t worry, Jeannie, I’ll be your marbles and he was, he remembered everything she didn’t and fed her the information in whispers, he took care of her and I don’t want it to sound like he did this in a normal way, because Uncle Marbles – Auntie Jean starting calling him Marbles and so did the rest of us – took care of her like Mother Hercules Theresa.

I call him from the airport, his voice when he answers matches the heatwaves from the tarmac, pretty soon he drives up to where I am standing in the bright sunshine, there's no cloud of dust around him but everything is that colour, his old truck, the dog, his corduroy shirt, him.

Is there such a thing as hug etiquette – which way do your arms go, which side your head – we grapple and come to rest in a pause of pure love, if there is a required or suggested duration for this, we ignore it. We stand clutching one another for so long I wonder in a nonessential barely there way if I might be successfully meditating for the first time ever, and whether he has fallen asleep ** please enjoy this interlude of undetermined duration ** we rub one another’s back simultaneously, twist and crack apart, he says you drive, and I’m telling you getting into that truck it’s like getting to your favourite part in a book, or getting into cool sheets on a hot summer night, or somebody saying we better eat this ice cream it’s melting here’s a spoon.

I keep looking at him – he’s wisely squinting and pleasantly handsome – like the good guy in a western, the lake sparkles and boils behind him, he's smiling.

I spent summers with him and Aunty Jean, and moved in full-time when she got sick, I did the cooking and shopping and chores, Aunty Jean taught me how to knit at night while Uncle Marble read his diaries from when he was a seafarer – the distance he managed to gain from his chair across the room was astounding – the knitting eventually degraded to braiding, we did it together side by side on the couch, the long plaits twirled to the floor, I'd usually undo them and pull them back into balls of wool but if I didn't do it in time the wool wasn't flat enough for her, she couldn’t tolerate wavy wool and she’d throw it to the wind, the birds and squirrels used it for their nests, me and Uncle Marble used to sit on the porch and play I Spy about flecks of colour in the giant trees, etc.

Uncle Marble’s nose slides across The Sleeping Giant’s profile and it comes to me that maybe this story won’t have a happy ending after all, I should visit more often, I never should have moved away, sometimes I think about home home when I’m in the city and it feels ludicrous that I’m so far away, my beak points toward the nearest bar and I trade myself in at the door.

It’s like driving through a photo album, a significance in each glance, fields I swayed in, doors I knocked on, pathways I took, Claire’s faded house.

There are things at the place half done, he can’t do everything alone, who can. I’ll help you with that I say let’s tackle that tomorrow I say we’ll need the tractor soon.

At dusk we’re on the porch, there’s a deep corn field in front of us, one of wheat next, then the bubbling row of walnuts this side of the tracks, then the lake, and it’s very pleasant, so comfortable, we’re talking and laughing and remembering, I’m happy I’m here, I keep saying how goddamn beautiful it is and it really is, everything’s purple but the lake’s silver, the sky is light and the early moon’s there like a sticker in the sky, some billowy clouds moving along the tracks like the trains used to, we counted as high as two hundred and seventeen cars once. I get an arrow. He says there’s lots of work up here now what with the new line they’re building from Marathon to Manitoba, I get an arrow, Claire’s back in town he says, three arrows at once, I don’t say anything I don’t even breathe, I spy a blue fleck in the birch, my beak opens and I get a sudden desire to go for a walk.

I make the sounds you can only make on an old wooden porch, the rocking chair rocks empty, my heels space out the seconds, I go down the stairs each one gives a different note.

I look back at my uncle and he’s smiling,

I know I said some unflattering things about city-Cupid, but here, Cupid is different.

Everything started with the opening sentence. Wait. That might be the stupidest thing I’ve said lately although there are some pretty ripe contenders, this is my second week of a dreamy holiday, there are a million Nancy Drew books in one of the bedrooms, I’ve read a few thousand of them already, there are a million stars at night and I open-mouth swoon at them, there was a full moon the colour of a peach and I uttered wow so many times somebody nudged me. Twice.

Lake Superior is an autological lake.

I googled Carolyn Keene early this morning. I wanted to see if she’d written anything else and that’s when I found out the horrible truth. So most of this story is true except for the parts that relate to the first sentence. I do that a lot. There’s something honourable about fiction, lies are expected and allowed, but when you mix fiction and non it feels a bit like deception, and it’s lovely to write, it’s gently devious, fun to pull the wool slowly. Don’t know why I forget how to pronounce things when I read them aloud, forgive me, thanks for being here.

There’s a light on next door. Did you know that Carolyn Keene was a pseudonym and that the Nancy Drew books were ghostwritten by multiple ghosts, many of whom were men. I know. Like, fucking boo! I only just found out about it and am disproportionately upset, my fridge is not working and there is a heat wave and I couldn’t give a rat’s ass, spoiled food is nothing compared to this. I admired Carolyn Keene deeply. She and Olympian Nancy Green who zoomed down those mountains so beautifully were my heroes. I used to bomb down our slopes with zero control and I used to write the same way, yesterday I was told I write like a river, I have leveled off with practice but the motion’s the same, it's purposefully out of control now, mostly. Do you wish I hadn’t told you about the ghosts? Well wake the fuck up sunshine this has been going on forever. Silas Marner was different, Mary Ann called herself George for gender cred. They tear down monuments and rename streets and cities and universities but Silas Marner's still by George Elliot. There’s a light on next door. Shall I invent a reason for my neighbour to be up at this hour? What is on his conscience or is there something souring in his guts. I watch the figure move from room to room, should I give him a limp or a lisp or maybe just a late night tilt which could mean he’s slightly drunk but could also mean many other things. It could mean he is a relation. I will give him a winning Scrabble name, Joaquin Zachery Moxley. There’s a light on next door. He could be my uncle, my grandfather, the light’s not perfect and there is distance so he could also be a she. Who wants to see the stripes on anyone’s pyjamas through the stagnant hot – Stella! – summer – Stella! – night – Stella! He paces, there’s something of a soldier to the way he walks and turns and walks and turns but those soft blue rumpled stripes down his silhouette indicate otherwise. At first I think he is drinking invisible liquid from an invisible glass until I realize he is checking his watch. What? What? What? And what of the heart beneath his striped pocket? Is it in pieces or irregular or fraudulent or simply pumping his blood around that irritated shape. Fucking weird how men wear an approximation of a business suit to bed. There’s a light on next door. Can anyone tell me what to do… like… in general. Wait. Look. Write? Now? Here? Him? There’s a light on next door. It is 3:20am. I, too, pace. I, too, wear pyjamas although mine are old clothes still in circulation because I wear them on don'tgiveafuck days. There’s a light on next door. I find my boots and slip into them and I go quietly out my screen door which closes softly like a swallow and to the light like a moth. If someone said oh and by the way we have been hiding other things, too, there is less gravity at night, the appendix governs the imagination, the composition of water is H3O, I would remain unaffected but for a casual nod of acknowledgment. There is a light on next door. You are going to think me mad. Next door is where my glut of characters live, the poor bastards, the place is lousy with them, they live like an indifferent cat lady’s cats and once in a while one of them makes it to the living room and is up for grabs. I am going to watch this guy. I am going to take my disappointment out on him. There’s a light on next door. There are a few errant cicadas, the rumble and blur of a hot city, the tic tic tic of a hammer or the drip drip drip of H3O. No. Wait. It’s typewriter keys. He will have no lisp or tilt but tinnitus, he is unaware of the cicadas and cannot hear the click of the opening door but he feels a slight pull of air, it’s hot, it’s Stanley Kowalski hot, it’s desperate, his pyjama pocket is electric, he sees me. We tread the air like water but do not move closer to one another, he indicates with a lean of his head the piece of paper in the typewriter, there are others like him in the deep basement but there’s something about him, the pyjamas he wears like a suit, I need somebody to take my disappointment out on, maybe I’ll make him a ghostwriter, or maybe I’ll just make him a ghost. I swim to the typewriter and there’s only one sentence: There’s a light on next door.

WALLFLOWER by Sherry Cassells

She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not

I have soft shoulders, my mother says I am afraid of shadows, she is a literary snob who calls me The Child of Shalott. 

I hear her soaked lips spread across her teeth, it is getting dark, one day past summer solstice, one drink in, and I am for a short time the apple of her eye. She invites me to sit on the chair with her, there’s no room but I pretend to fit, my filthy summer knees with knobs of insect bites next to hers, a thin and pale eleven, like me.

This is the childhood I remember, the window I can today see through, I have learned that if I keep this imaginary window clear of clutter and debris I can return to the sprawling gardens of my childhood. My mother would have shoved the word privileged before childhood – like most people, she believed wealth and privilege were the same thing.

Peace in the twilight of a generous backyard – fireflies light, birds collapse, breezes flare, the heave of nearby shores – I remember it all.

My mother smelled of damp roses and gin, my head rested upon her soft shoulder, I squinted into the partial sun. I can hear her mouth open, the way she took in the last of the light and exhaled it in a sweet column of alto, somewhere on the flat cusp between hymn and dirge, her throat hugged the notes with acute control. She could torque to soprano at any time. It felt, and I remember this deeply, as if a balloon were about to burst as I waited for it, grateful when it didn’t come, shattered when it did. I preferred she save that shrill for the stage.

The gardens were many, they were beautiful and brief, we stayed five weeks in Barcelona once, long enough to see the midnight blue Irises into flower and back again. Usually we stayed in places for only two weeks, my mother and I, the supplied chefs, maids, a driver and a gardener, as well as her manager, Mrs. Buettner, who wore midi dresses always, one sleeve long and fastened at her wrist, the other short and gathered at her elbow. I’d seen her at bedtime and her nightgown was the same. The numbers on her forearm were blurred and indistinguishable, I didn’t understand why she would want them to be seen, and I only asked once what they said, she said they spelled out hell, and my mother cleared her throat. Everyone took notice when my mother cleared her throat. Mrs. Buettner inflated sharply, I pressed against her, she was my closest, my only, friend.

My busy mother left me to either Mrs. Buettner or the tepid pool of maids. Too young to question my intuition, I was bold with languages, and aside from being served escargot once when I’d ordered a hot dog, I was sufficiently understood. Things I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about I couldn’t communicate. Once a gentlemen asked me what my famous mother was, and I replied, in Spanish, a polish hen.

He smiled, his teeth were too big for him, I found it hilarious and we laughed together, he at my poltricidal accusations, me at his teeth. I urged Mrs. Buettner to get me something to draw with and I built that man from nothing to something over and over again, each time I howled.

Whoever he was, he is visible through the aforementioned window, and although I only saw him once, his face may be the first I recognize in heaven.

The Fragile Ones

In each new place I was at first tired and jet-lagged, without any notion of time or place, I was dull and uninterested, I felt as if I had emerged from deep water with a mild but enduring case of the bends. I wished myself not exactly dead but not quite alive either. My plugged ears made me wary and introspective, I had suspicions about fluctuating gravity, I did not believe the universe would maintain its churning chaos, but a sort of faith came upon me at day three and I was aware of scent and temperature again, the creak in my ears subsided and I no longer needed to open my mouth terribly wide, like my mother on stage, to activate them.

My Mother did not understand these days of purgatory, she said I was being stubborn and indulgent, it was easy for her, protected as she was by her entourage. We went from cold Poland to throbbing Kuwait and it didn’t phase her, she cared only for the turned up faces of her audience, they gave her the connection she needed, while I groped for any strands of love I could find, even those I imagined.

I tried to stick to my caregivers, I brushed against them to remind them of my existence, yes, but also to create a sort of static. They took me into their world wearing their garb. I memorized the shape of their bodies, the clothes they wore, in case the fundamental forces that held up the universe faltered and they lost me.

But in the gardens, and there were always gardens, I needed nothing and no one. 

Similar to my affinity for languages, I had a feel for the earth and its creatures, my audience. I crawled into their beds, I sniffed their flowers and leaves and stalks, I pressed my fingers into the ring of dirt they pierced. I was a spoiled child and in each new place I insisted my bedroom window overlook the garden, I heard the wind sigh through its bones at night, my mother’s footsteps down the hallway, The Lady of Shalott, half-tired of everything.

The summer I turned 13 we were in Greece, my mother said we had been there before but I knew otherwise, I would never have forgotten the villas so white against the blue sky. When we landed I did not suffer a head full of construction, I was neither sleepy nor dull nor drowning, I was energetic and happy, I ran ahead without looking back. 

They said her heart was fragile.

For a moment I did not understand the word, I tried to find it among the cascade of languages in my head but there was nothing for it – fragile was not a word anyone would ever choose to describe my mother. She was perhaps weak about love, I never blamed or scorned her, in my way I understood my existence was an obstacle for her, I was only mildly sorry about it.

But in Greece I was different. Busy with my sudden courage I swam alone, I walked without purpose through the streets, a flower tucked behind my brazen ear, I accepted the universe and the universe accepted me. I made a vow to understand its laws. 

I do not think this new courage was acquired, it was not accidental either, it was simply offered so that I would be able to steel myself against my mother’s death a few weeks later.

Uncle Frederick

There will always be things I wish I had asked her:

what was her mother’s maiden name?
why was it so hard for her to love me?
which was her favourite city in which to sing?
why was it so hard for her to love me?
had she ever loved my father?
why was it so hard for her to love me?
did she fall in love with Pavarotti that time in Rome?
why was it so hard for her to love me?
was the diamond necklace really from President Kennedy??
why was it so hard for her to love me?
did she know of her fragility?
why was it so hard for her to love me?

There are not enough question marks in the world to sustain the slew of queries I had about my father.

The venue in Rome where she had adorned the stage in the company of Pavarotti received a share of her estate, an aunt I had not known about received a similar amount, an uncle the same on both counts, a share for Mrs. Buettner, more names I didn’t know and other charitable contributions, the rest was put in trust for me.

As quickly as I had come into my courage, I retreated back, like the blue Barcelonian irises. 

I sat in the lawyer’s office wearing a black dress, Aunt Bea across the table, she was a lesser version of my mother with half her beauty and no style, she spoke exclusively through one side of her mouth. She was unmoved at our introduction. I thought perhaps a stroke had made her a lopsided syllable-skipper until Mrs. Buettner came into the room with her uneven sleeves and Aunt Bea smiled like a teacup.

I asked her about my uncle Frederick and she said oh Freddy’s an arse-knot.

Had her lips not approximated the shape in question I probably would have been alright, but it gave me a shove of giggles – the too-small room was suddenly hot – she said what’s so funny about that? in her sideways way and it pushed me over the edge, I did not have the throat control to suppress it, that peculiar insane glee so void of joy, it shook and flushed me, I knew how horrible I looked, like a shitting gargoyle, I groped my way out of the room, they probably called it shock and it probably was.

Still spasmodic, I watched someone float from the elevator, he was perhaps a pilot, he spoke to someone and then came to me, he took me in his arms and – what’s it called? – the opposite of the bends? – something to do with a confused inner ear when one is in space? – whatever it is, that’s how I felt. I half-expected to fall into a faint but instead I experienced the opposite, an absence of gravity, and I worried that if he held me any tighter I would shoot upwards right out of my clothes.

He took me by the hand and walked me back into the room. 

Somebody said ah, Frederick, and another somebody said, you must be the astronaut.

My Silent Era

I had not understood my situation, I simply put on the black dress the housekeeper hanged on the back of my bedroom door, slipped my skinny stockinged feet into the penny-loafers offered, and followed instructions.

I was driven to the offices of Decker & Dunn and launched into an elevator, I could see the curvature of the earth from where I sat at the long table, the room was barren and dull but for a small grey moth on the windowsill bouncing against the glass. Two weeks later I was living with Aunt Bea in a suburban townhouse reading a book in my tiny borrowed bedroom – it was my mother’s copy of Rebecca – I pulled my chair to the window, my head against the glass, I remembered the moth.

She hollered for me when she needed the potatoes peeled or something from the top shelf, I waited for her call after the toilet flushed in the mornings, she took her glasses off to weigh herself and I read aloud and charted the number. I lied one way when I wanted a good breakfast; the other way when I wanted revenge.

Excluding my episode in Greece, I had seldom applied myself, and it was for her, my almost mythological self, that I studied. I was quiet about it. Aunt Bea nearly had a bird when the school called and told her I had been accepted, at the age of 16, to university.

In the early fall I left without ado, my trust allowed expenses such as a car and an on-campus apartment, in the afternoon I pulled into a picnic spot within a forest, the trees had not turned but there was a spice to the atmosphere’s cool sway, I saw a bloom of orange to my left and was drawn into the madly moving shadows, a portion of forest where every branch, every frond, every flake of life gave perch to an enormous cloud of resting monarchs.

This was the second most important event of my life.

The banging moth for whom I had been host the past four ragged, miserable years – I do not wish to sound Jane Eyre but living with Mrs. Rochester will do that – was suddenly gone and in its stead poured the roaring butterflies, and for the first time since the streets of Greece I felt curious.

I went deeper into the forest at full speed. The air spewed pollen and seed and I remembered a perfectly horizontal snowstorm in Russia. This was a Canadian fall yet the earth said otherwise – it said irises in Barcelonian blue, it displayed in Roman numerals the bamboo forests of Japan, the calligraphic heather of Heathcliff’s moors against the sea, the gunshot spread of poppies in Romania, the roses of Seville, the climb of Manderley’s gigantic rhododendrons – I walked through it all, my head leaning into my mother’s alto at the verge of the forest.

After a year of general studies I devoured botany first, then chemistry, a side of language and literature, at 27 I became a medical doctor. Still in my era of silence, I had no friends, but there were others like me, we shared theories, we discussed algebraic formulas in whispers, we folded and passed notes scrawled with symptoms, we synopsized sonnets into glances, we mouthed the diseases most likely.

Uncle Frederick invited me to visit him that summer, I had not yet determined what was next, certainly it would not be practicing medicine. Aunt Bea was on a cruise and he showed me the picture she sent, there was bird shit on her sunglasses and we howled, he kissed my forehead goodnight.

I was cared for throughout childhood, tolerated in youth, perhaps admired at university, but never had I been loved until Uncle Frederick loved me. This was a revelation – but upon examination that sleepless night in Uncle Frederick’s thin-ceilinged bungalow – the revelation was that it was not a revelation at all.

I remembered the day of the moth, the smooth planet beneath me, Mrs. Buettner across the table, she would not let me catch her eye. When we were dismissed I scrambled for her but she was Mrs. Danvers, cold and remote, she turned away, she walked to the elevator and threw herself in. She had not loved me. As the night wore on, slow as evolution, I realized the same of sweet Celia in Rome, Grace in Taiwan, Miss Borden in Montevideo, Margaret in Belfast, more Graces, a Bernice, some Susans – women and girls all over the world – I mistook their kindnesses for love, but it was more than that, for even their kindnesses were forged, they were simply making their livings.

I thought of them not with scorn but disappointment, not at their insincerity but my interpretation of it, and then I thought of them no more. Into the space came the curdled grief I had been holding fast since my mother’s death, it unfurled slightly, and for an instant, aired itself out.

I had not forgotten my vow to understand the universe; I studied astrophysics at Uncle Frederick’s alma matar. He took great interest in this, we visited and wrote one another letters, I asked one question about my mother in each, he was able to answer all of them except he didn’t know her favourite venue and I suspected it was an invalid request, and that she had not had one.

I remained curious about my worth; still I did not know why it had been so hard for her to love me.

Zero Gravity

In the fall of my second year, Decker & Dunn sent an urgent notice that Aunt Bea had died. It was an eight hour drive back to that horrible place and I went, she’d moved from her townhouse to a country estate where the service was held, an old woman came to me and put her cheek to mine, she smelled of gin and roses and I half-expected my mother’s ghost but it was Mrs. Buettner, there were tears in her eyes that wet my cheek, I did not blame her for not loving me, I looked beyond her into Aunt Bea’s garden where a flock of spent irises blew, she sneezed in my arms, I said bless you and then I realized it was a sob, and said bless you again.

After my doctorate in astrophysics I applied to NASA. I am 34 and about to go into space for the first time. Uncle Frederick is in the control room.

I have butterflies.

There is a quiet moment before the most unquiet, and I am completely internalized, this is overwhelming and we are warned and counseled about it, trained to keep our minds engaged, but Uncle Frederick said it is an opportunity if you are strong enough, and you are, so I let mine go, and in the eleven minutes it takes from ignition to launch, I get the orange from the forest, it opens like a curtain behind which cut-out white shapes glow beneath a blue ceiling, the man with the too-large teeth laughs across the stage, the turned up face of the mythological me watches from a single-seat audience, and it comes to me – in the light of all the years – how loved I was.

I wanted this story to be a meaty one, so I wrote 500 words a day for six consecutive days, give or take, each one is a little chapter, I posted the first one a week or so ago and instead of eeking it out I wanted to post the entire thing today. It’s a beautiful day, the water is calm, last night was a full moon and you can still feel it, this lake is deep, thanks for being here.

WALLFLOWER by Sherry Cassells

She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not

I have soft shoulders, my mother says I am afraid of shadows, she is a literary snob who calls me The Child of Shalott. 

I hear her soaked lips spread across her teeth, it is getting dark, one day past summer solstice, one drink in, and I am for a short time the apple of her eye. She invites me to sit on the chair with her, there’s no room but I pretend to fit, my filthy summer knees with knobs of insect bites next to hers, a thin and pale eleven, like me.

This is the childhood I remember, the window I can today see through, I have learned that if I keep this imaginary window clear of clutter and debris I can return to the sprawling gardens of my childhood. My mother would have shoved the word privileged before childhood – like most people, she believed wealth and privilege were the same thing.

Peace in the twilight of a generous backyard – fireflies light, birds collapse, breezes flare, the heave of nearby shores – I remember it all.

My mother smelled of damp roses and gin, my head rested upon her soft shoulder, I squinted into the partial sun. I can hear her mouth open, the way she took in the last of the light and exhaled it in a sweet column of alto, somewhere on the flat cusp between hymn and dirge, her throat hugged the notes with acute control. She could torque to soprano at any time. It felt, and I remember this deeply, as if a balloon were about to burst as I waited for it, grateful when it didn’t come, shattered when it did. I preferred she save that shrill for the stage.

The gardens were many, they were beautiful and brief, we stayed five weeks in Barcelona once, long enough to see the midnight blue Irises into flower and back again. Usually we stayed in places for only two weeks, my mother and I, the supplied chefs, maids, a driver and a gardener, as well as her manager, Mrs. Buettner, who wore midi dresses always, one sleeve long and fastened at her wrist, the other short and gathered at her elbow. I’d seen her at bedtime and her nightgown was the same. The numbers on her forearm were blurred and indistinguishable, I didn’t understand why she would want them to be seen, and I only asked once what they said, she said they spelled out hell, and my mother cleared her throat. Everyone took notice when my mother cleared her throat. Mrs. Buettner inflated sharply, I pressed against her, she was my closest, my only, friend.

My busy mother left me to either Mrs. Buettner or the tepid pool of maids. Too young to question my intuition, I was bold with languages, and aside from being served escargot once when I’d ordered a hot dog, I was sufficiently understood. Things I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about I couldn’t communicate. Once a gentlemen asked me what my famous mother was, and I replied, in Spanish, a polish hen.

He smiled, his teeth were too big for him, I found it hilarious and we laughed together, he at my poltricidal accusations, me at his teeth. I urged Mrs. Buettner to get me something to draw with and I built that man from nothing to something over and over again, each time I howled.

Whoever he was, he is visible through the aforementioned window, and although I only saw him once, his face may be the first I recognize in heaven.

The Fragile Ones

In each new place I was at first tired and jet-lagged, without any notion of time or place, I was dull and uninterested, I felt as if I had emerged from deep water with a mild but enduring case of the bends. I wished myself not exactly dead but not quite alive either. My plugged ears made me wary and introspective, I had suspicions about fluctuating gravity, I did not believe the universe would maintain its churning chaos, but a sort of faith came upon me at day three and I was aware of scent and temperature again, the creak in my ears subsided and I no longer needed to open my mouth terribly wide, like my mother on stage, to activate them.

My Mother did not understand these days of purgatory, she said I was being stubborn and indulgent, it was easy for her, protected as she was by her entourage. We went from cold Poland to throbbing Kuwait and it didn’t phase her, she cared only for the turned up faces of her audience, they gave her the connection she needed, while I groped for any strands of love I could find, even those I imagined.

I tried to stick to my caregivers, I brushed against them to remind them of my existence, yes, but also to create a sort of static. They took me into their world wearing their garb. I memorized the shape of their bodies, the clothes they wore, in case the fundamental forces that held up the universe faltered and they lost me.

But in the gardens, and there were always gardens, I needed nothing and no one. 

Similar to my affinity for languages, I had a feel for the earth and its creatures, my audience. I crawled into their beds, I sniffed their flowers and leaves and stalks, I pressed my fingers into the ring of dirt they pierced. I was a spoiled child and in each new place I insisted my bedroom window overlook the garden, I heard the wind sigh through its bones at night, my mother’s footsteps down the hallway, The Lady of Shalott, half-tired of everything.

The summer I turned 13 we were in Greece, my mother said we had been there before but I knew otherwise, I would never have forgotten the villas so white against the blue sky. When we landed I did not suffer a head full of construction, I was neither sleepy nor dull nor drowning, I was energetic and happy, I ran ahead without looking back. 

They said her heart was fragile.

For a moment I did not understand the word, I tried to find it among the cascade of languages in my head but there was nothing for it – fragile was not a word anyone would ever choose to describe my mother. She was perhaps weak about love, I never blamed or scorned her, in my way I understood my existence was an obstacle for her, I was only mildly sorry about it.

But in Greece I was different. Busy with my sudden courage I swam alone, I walked without purpose through the streets, a flower tucked behind my brazen ear, I accepted the universe and the universe accepted me. I made a vow to understand its laws. 

I do not think this new courage was acquired, it was not accidental either, it was simply offered so that I would be able to steel myself against my mother’s death a few weeks later.

Uncle Frederick

There will always be things I wish I had asked her:

what was her mother’s maiden name?
why was it so hard for her to love me?
which was her favourite city in which to sing?
why was it so hard for her to love me?
had she ever loved my father?
why was it so hard for her to love me?
did she fall in love with Pavarotti that time in Rome?
why was it so hard for her to love me?
was the diamond necklace really from President Kennedy??
why was it so hard for her to love me?
did she know of her fragility?
why was it so hard for her to love me?

There are not enough question marks in the world to sustain the slew of queries I had about my father.

The venue in Rome where she had adorned the stage in the company of Pavarotti received a share of her estate, an aunt I had not known about received a similar amount, an uncle the same on both counts, a share for Mrs. Buettner, more names I didn’t know and other charitable contributions, the rest was put in trust for me.

As quickly as I had come into my courage, I retreated back, like the blue Barcelonian irises. 

I sat in the lawyer’s office wearing a black dress, Aunt Bea across the table, she was a lesser version of my mother with half her beauty and no style, she spoke exclusively through one side of her mouth. She was unmoved at our introduction. I thought perhaps a stroke had made her a lopsided syllable-skipper until Mrs. Buettner came into the room with her uneven sleeves and Aunt Bea smiled like a teacup.

I asked her about my uncle Frederick and she said oh Freddy’s an arse-knot.

Had her lips not approximated the shape in question I probably would have been alright, but it gave me a shove of giggles – the too-small room was suddenly hot – she said what’s so funny about that? in her sideways way and it pushed me over the edge, I did not have the throat control to suppress it, that peculiar insane glee so void of joy, it shook and flushed me, I knew how horrible I looked, like a shitting gargoyle, I groped my way out of the room, they probably called it shock and it probably was.

Still spasmodic, I watched someone float from the elevator, he was perhaps a pilot, he spoke to someone and then came to me, he took me in his arms and – what’s it called? – the opposite of the bends? – something to do with a confused inner ear when one is in space? – whatever it is, that’s how I felt. I half-expected to fall into a faint but instead I experienced the opposite, an absence of gravity, and I worried that if he held me any tighter I would shoot upwards right out of my clothes.

He took me by the hand and walked me back into the room. 

Somebody said ah, Frederick, and another somebody said, you must be the astronaut.

My Silent Era

I had not understood my situation, I simply put on the black dress the housekeeper hanged on the back of my bedroom door, slipped my skinny stockinged feet into the penny-loafers offered, and followed instructions.

I was driven to the offices of Decker & Dunn and launched into an elevator, I could see the curvature of the earth from where I sat at the long table, the room was barren and dull but for a small grey moth on the windowsill bouncing against the glass. Two weeks later I was living with Aunt Bea in a suburban townhouse reading a book in my tiny borrowed bedroom – it was my mother’s copy of Rebecca – I pulled my chair to the window, my head against the glass, I remembered the moth.

She hollered for me when she needed the potatoes peeled or something from the top shelf, I waited for her call after the toilet flushed in the mornings, she took her glasses off to weigh herself and I read aloud and charted the number. I lied one way when I wanted a good breakfast; the other way when I wanted revenge.

Excluding my episode in Greece, I had seldom applied myself, and it was for her, my almost mythological self, that I studied. I was quiet about it. Aunt Bea nearly had a bird when the school called and told her I had been accepted, at the age of 16, to university.

In the early fall I left without ado, my trust allowed expenses such as a car and an on-campus apartment, in the afternoon I pulled into a picnic spot within a forest, the trees had not turned but there was a spice to the atmosphere’s cool sway, I saw a bloom of orange to my left and was drawn into the madly moving shadows, a portion of forest where every branch, every frond, every flake of life gave perch to an enormous cloud of resting monarchs.

This was the second most important event of my life.

The banging moth for whom I had been host the past four ragged, miserable years – I do not wish to sound Jane Eyre but living with Mrs. Rochester will do that – was suddenly gone and in its stead poured the roaring butterflies, and for the first time since the streets of Greece I felt curious.

I went deeper into the forest at full speed. The air spewed pollen and seed and I remembered a perfectly horizontal snowstorm in Russia. This was a Canadian fall yet the earth said otherwise – it said irises in Barcelonian blue, it displayed in Roman numerals the bamboo forests of Japan, the calligraphic heather of Heathcliff’s moors against the sea, the gunshot spread of poppies in Romania, the roses of Seville, the climb of Manderley’s gigantic rhododendrons – I walked through it all, my head leaning into my mother’s alto at the verge of the forest.

After a year of general studies I devoured botany first, then chemistry, a side of language and literature, at 27 I became a medical doctor. Still in my era of silence, I had no friends, but there were others like me, we shared theories, we discussed algebraic formulas in whispers, we folded and passed notes scrawled with symptoms, we synopsized sonnets into glances, we mouthed the diseases most likely.

Uncle Frederick invited me to visit him that summer, I had not yet determined what was next, certainly it would not be practicing medicine. Aunt Bea was on a cruise and he showed me the picture she sent, there was bird shit on her sunglasses and we howled, he kissed my forehead goodnight.

I was cared for throughout childhood, tolerated in youth, perhaps admired at university, but never had I been loved until Uncle Frederick loved me. This was a revelation – but upon examination that sleepless night in Uncle Frederick’s thin-ceilinged bungalow – the revelation was that it was not a revelation at all.

I remembered the day of the moth, the smooth planet beneath me, Mrs. Buettner across the table, she would not let me catch her eye. When we were dismissed I scrambled for her but she was Mrs. Danvers, cold and remote, she turned away, she walked to the elevator and threw herself in. She had not loved me. As the night wore on, slow as evolution, I realized the same of sweet Celia in Rome, Grace in Taiwan, Miss Borden in Montevideo, Margaret in Belfast, more Graces, a Bernice, some Susans – women and girls all over the world – I mistook their kindnesses for love, but it was more than that, for even their kindnesses were forged, they were simply making their livings.

I thought of them not with scorn but disappointment, not at their insincerity but my interpretation of it, and then I thought of them no more. Into the space came the curdled grief I had been holding fast since my mother’s death, it unfurled slightly, and for an instant, aired itself out.

I had not forgotten my vow to understand the universe; I studied astrophysics at Uncle Frederick’s alma matar. He took great interest in this, we visited and wrote one another letters, I asked one question about my mother in each, he was able to answer all of them except he didn’t know her favourite venue and I suspected it was an invalid request, and that she had not had one.

I remained curious about my worth; still I did not know why it had been so hard for her to love me.

Zero Gravity

In the fall of my second year, Decker & Dunn sent an urgent notice that Aunt Bea had died. It was an eight hour drive back to that horrible place and I went, she’d moved from her townhouse to a country estate where the service was held, an old woman came to me and put her cheek to mine, she smelled of gin and roses and I half-expected my mother’s ghost but it was Mrs. Buettner, there were tears in her eyes that wet my cheek, I did not blame her for not loving me, I looked beyond her into Aunt Bea’s garden where a flock of spent irises blew, she sneezed in my arms, I said bless you and then I realized it was a sob, and said bless you again.

After my doctorate in astrophysics I applied to NASA. I am 34 and about to go into space for the first time. Uncle Frederick is in the control room.

I have butterflies.

There is a quiet moment before the most unquiet, and I am completely internalized, this is overwhelming and we are warned and counseled about it, trained to keep our minds engaged, but Uncle Frederick said it is an opportunity if you are strong enough, and you are, so I let mine go, and in the eleven minutes it takes from ignition to launch, I get the orange from the forest, it opens like a curtain behind which cut-out white shapes glow beneath a blue ceiling, the man with the too-large teeth laughs across the stage, the turned up face of the mythological me watches from a single-seat audience, and it comes to me – in the light of all the years – how loved I was.

Wrote this single-finger style on my iPad on a plane heading to Lake Superior yesterday. Now I am sitting at the shore, it 6:30 on Sunday morning, I hope you can hear the waves.

What is Love by Sherry Cassells

My mother tied her hair back like Virginia Woolf and wore the same style of dress, no prosthetic nose was required, the line of her silhouette both as sad and beautiful as her heroin, I know that word’s wrong, but it’s right, too, my mother died of an overdose when I was twelve.

She went from Virgin to Wolf when the needle hit its groove, and I went next door to the Campbell’s.

If I had to wring my childhood into a single drop it would contain the darkening hours at the Campbell’s kitchen table where I learned everything.

Jeopardy was on in the living room, we could hear the answers, we asked the questions quietly, often in unison, each of us held a pencil and we took turns at the crossword in the folded newspaper. Mr. and Mrs. Campbell's block letters were perfectly identical, it took a few weeks before I mastered mine to the same shape, and my anonymous answers went to the page with increased authority, any mistakes were anonymously corrected.

What is 1967, who is Carson McCullers, what is dioxin, who is Richard Nixon, what is Ohio, who is Lou Reed, what is Vietnam.

And then my mother died and suddenly what is foster care, where is home, who are these strangers, how will I cope.

 I wrote to my beautiful neighbours and they wrote back, I got a letter every three days, on nearly see-through paper, one paragraph his the next hers, their penmanship identical but I knew who was who, they asked me about school, what colour my bedroom was, what was I reading, they told me about the garden, Mr. Campbell’s new knee, nothing about the neighbourhood, nothing about missing me terribly, I imagined a ruined space where my house used to be like an extracted tooth.

I tried to find interesting things to write about, I was reading The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, it was okay, there were two other kids in the house, younger, a boy and a girl, they were okay, a dog named True, I lied that school was okay, we ate fish on Fridays, they asked if I liked fish now and I answered NO!

It became something other than wonderful when I got their letters, there was a sadness to them, they finally admitted they missed me and I quickly wrote in a very short burst that I missed them terribly and would they consider maybe not adopting me but fostering me, I mailed it before I thought it through, and three days later when I went home for lunch there was no letter, I’d blown it, I barely made it back to school for the weight of my sentence was enormous.

What is a happy ending.

I recognized their car in the driveway, I guess they were inside waiting for me, True got out when they opened the door, he galloped to me and I galloped too, past him, straight into the Campbells’ arms.

This isn’t a typical Litbit, if there is such a thing, because of its length mostly, and there’s no audio. I wrote it specifically for a short story competition with a 5000 word limit – it weighs in at 4999. It is currently on the short-list and I am on the edge. I am breaking a soft rule by offering it but we won’t tell, and I’ll take it down in a day or two. I hope you’re sitting by a lake with a side of forest – or maybe you’ll read this and imagine you are – either way, thanks for being here, and happy Canada day, hoser.

Our Mutual Bones by Sherry Cassells

EVERYTHING WE DON’T SAY

I hate these goodbyes.

We barely say the word anymore but it comes anyway, without pronunciation.

My mother says she knew when they bought the place its dangers. The cliffs of course, the storms, the wild lake, the jaggedness, she loved it all, but the remoteness, what she adored most, she cited as its truest peril. Alone before children – she tried to explain to me, her childless daughter – is different from alone after children. She won’t say lonely, our vocabulary continues its decline, love is in our bones, quiet as grief, but we don’t say it.

I stand before the lake, my knitted hands clasped behind my back, my head tilted to the sky. If this were a yoga pose it would be called heaven; if this were heaven I could stay.

There is so much sky here our eyelids are full of it, our gazes sink to the low horizon, in the direction of prayer. I learned early to look up for photographs. I am the startled one while others continue their private petitions.

The sky looks trampled; tomorrow there will be snow.

My mother didn’t take the screen door off this year and I hear it, a moment of summer slams to mind and then she comes to my side. I catch a sweet whiff of her. She has to tilt her head back to look me in the eye her lids are so full of sky. 

She knows it is difficult for me to leave.  

If you go today, you’ll miss the storm, she says, and before long I am a bubble along thin roads. I remember a tree here, a line of smoke there, puzzle-piece Jerseys jostle through the fallen fence in Maynard’s field, a ship in Lake Superior like something caught in my eye.

This is where I grew up and everything means something.

I feel a certain sharpening when I see the restaurant ahead – but I don’t recognize this stab as a foreshadowing – I have no idea that tomorrow I will look back on today and all the rest of it as my before life. I decide to stop in for a coffee, and when somebody hollers about a grilled cheese I get a sudden deep craving for the gooey buttery crunch. I am normally neutral to food but I need this, so I order one and take a booth at the window. 

The sky hurtles by; it feels as if I am still driving. The people in the booth behind me are talking so loud it’s like they’re in my back seat. 

My senses are acute from the enormity of home and all of its superlatives – the towering house on the gigantic cliff above the enormous lake, the whopping sky. Normalcy will kick in with distance but it will be nightfall before this quietly happens.

My lunch arrives right away, no crunch, the bread is soft and pale but I am only briefly disappointed, this is the true nature of grilled cheese, gooey buttery soft.

I half-listen to the men in my back seat.

How long has it been you said? Twenty years? Twenty five? 

it’s not so much the lake itself – twenty two, it’s been twenty two years – it’s more what the sky does to the lake and the way these things, these effects, are reciprocated ... it’s like a conversation, ya know, it’s a cumulative event that starts at dawn and – 

Why twenty two years? Why’d you wait so long?

I tried to go back but I was just a kid ... ran away seven times the first year … didn’t even make it out of Toronto the first two times –

Are you gonna finish that?

got as far as Thunder Bay twice – no, go ahead – anyway the colours, they don’t stop all day, around noon the sky and the water are almost the same ... but different ... I don’t know how to describe it ... it’s ... it’s ... like one is a painting and the other a poem, but they are saying the same things, artistically, ya know ... 

Listen, man, I gotta get back to the station, this storm is gonna make me a lot of money today, let me take you where you gotta go ... you didn’t give me an address –

I’ll know it when I see it.

Wait! You don’t know where we’re going?

It’s on the northwest coast, like I said. 

This is Lake Superior, bro, the northwest coast is – 

even at night you could feel the poetry ... add moonlight and o Jesus! ... the northern lights were there all the time, too ... they were like electricity, ya know … you could see them through the clouds if you knew what to look for ... I caught on eventually ... overwhelming for a kid, ya know ... I mean I didn’t know where I was half the time or how I got there –

This is my language. 

My formative view of the world as it came together from our house on the cliff is being described in words and paint. There is suddenly something other than stomach between my heart and bowel, a different atmosphere, and in this new space I shimmy from my booth, age 12 again, I stumble out of bed and into the bedroom across the hall where Tommy sleeps, I squirm into the booth behind me, he says my name like falling rocks, Stephanie, and I disintegrate. No. Wait. In reality I dare not move from my booth, I must keep steering, I have lost control before.

He used to open his covers for me like a wing after my nightmares. 

I told him my standard-fare ones, the recurring dreams that I was used to, the ones that didn’t have the catastrophic elements to qualify as nightmares, the kind that woke me with a wet gasp instead of an unutterable scream. Under their weight I was able to make it across the hall to Tommy’s room in a single bound – but don’t get me wrong – these dreams would terrify a less seasoned nightmarer. 

Tommy recognized the non-traumatic ones and pulled them out of me word by word.

Which one? he asked at first, but eventually he understood their consequences and asked no more. We tried to figure out where the dreams came from, we lay shoulder to shoulder dissecting the events of the day and sometimes we’d find a clue, like after the barn-on-fire dream we might remember the burned Yorkshire pudding, or after the dead-flock-of-sheep one we might remember the frantic chorus of bleats we heard when howls came in the wind. 

These dreams, however gruesome, were each remarkably beautiful in a similar way. 

The colours more luscious than their daytime equivalents beneath a sky that churned with galaxies in which pale planets rode the horizon dusty and large. The forests grew in a gorgeous yet grotesque way, like a fairy tale about to turn.

One of these dreams started in exquisite peaceful silence, it was like the opening to a movie, the sun behind the trees caused vibrant stripes across our exaggerated lawn, the sky tumbled peacefully, and suddenly the front door crashed open and Tommy ran full-speed across the green terrain of my dream and straight over the cliff.

Of course he knew when I’d had this dream, he apologized for his role, he suggested I might be able to change it if I thought about it in a meditative way, maybe I could alter my dream bit by bit – and turn him into a bird.

To help this along, he sometimes “went bird” during the day, I can’t explain how he did this, not overtly – not by chirp or swoop – it was both more than and less than that.

My other nightmares were unspeakable, too difficult for lucid articulation, too grave for me to admit, they came with a different sort of peril. In their hell I shouldered overwhelming responsibility to the people I loved, I was forced to make decisions upon which their lives depended, without the intelligence, or the time to properly make them, I woke with unspeakable grief and guilt and clamored into his room writhing.

Unaware of my crime I felt I deserved my punishments but Tommy whispered the same thing all those mangled nights, our heads at prayer. You’ll grow out of them, Stephanie, he said.

I never asked about his dreams but I had the feeling they paled in comparison to the horrors he’d experienced in his life. I’d taken a peek into his folder once when the children’s aid woman was there, I had the idea that if he weren’t hurling himself over the cliffs of my dreams, he would do it outside of my dreams.

I tried to make him a bird. 

I cannot put my efforts into words in the same way I can’t tell you how Tommy “went bird” to encourage me, nor can I determine if the bright feathers I see when I close my eyes at this moment were really there, in my dream I mean, or if over the years I have placed them in my memory one after the other.

Still with me?

He was only two weeks older than me, I don’t know how he knew the apocalyptic tendencies of my dreams would lessen, but they did. 

Still I suffer the residue of those snap decisions, and if adulthood can compensate for childhood trauma, I consider everything now with care like spun glass, I twirl each concept every possible way, I study consequence and variance, I learn how all angles react to light, to the touch, to time. I am so overcareful with decisions that the impatient universe often takes over and makes them for me.

I know what I do by doing nothing.

Tommy was only with us for a year, rare for an Indigenous kid to get placed in our community but we were fresh out of needy white kids, I’d seen the flyer for a summer foster family with his small dark picture, a full fringe of phone numbers at the bottom. I ripped it down and left it on the counter at home. This was how I got both my dogs and again it worked. In a week Tommy was there and just like the dogs he spent the first few days flat on the grass, pressed between earth and sky, he’d hear the screen door and turn his head, his green eyes already starting to angle.

I look outside at the disappearing road. The snow is a full day early. I stand behind my prediction; the storm itself is at fault.

On the first day of summer holidays, he’d been with us exactly a year, I got up in the night frightened and confused, I crossed the hallway as usual but his door was open, my brightly-lit mother like a moth turned to me, Tommy’s small bathing suit in one hand, a few shirts scattered on the bed, she said, his mother is here and she wants to take him to Toronto, Stephanie, what do we do?

I had only just woken from a disaster, a true nightmare, and another dilemma for which I was unprepared was too much for me. I DON’T CARE! I hollered. 

In the morning he was gone.

Just a smear of ketchup on my plate, my tea is finished, the cheque is on the upside-down table. No. Wait. The cheque is upside-down on the table, the storm is fierce, the voices have stopped, my back seat is empty, the obedient universe has kicked in again.

What would I have said to him anyway?

Probably a compensatory joke, but it’s not free, it would cost one of us, probably him – you sure know how to make an exit! – and the blame would slide to his 12-year-old self, he probably thinks it’s his fault anyway, foster kids think everything’s their fault, and then the moment where I disintegrate, uttering every I’m sorry in the unsorry universe. I think that’s what’s in the space between heart and bowel, it’s full of sorry.

I pay the bill and go through the first set of doors. I pause in the vestibule, my eyes at prayer. There’s a particular silence that comes with this much snow, and don’t ask me how I know but I know that at this very moment I am on the brink of leaving before behind.

This feeling. It reminds me of the moment I was able to quiet the Tommy nightmare, the moment I was finally able to make him fly.

He comes through the door all green-eyed and snowy, my eyes float up in their wet whites, he says my name.

THE LOST WEEKEND

The barn is positioned in what my father called Tourette’s Tunnel where it’s Kansas-windy and swearing is allowed. You can see the wind, it has worn a pathway through the field and this path has changed position over the years, in tiny increments, there may come a day when the house is in its tunnel but by then we will be long gone. I never understood how the barn stayed put and its toppling was often a prelude to my nightmares, my mother’s sheep dropping from the cliff in clumps.

But the sheep understand the wind like sailors, they traipse along the edge in little clouds. My mother is a weaver, she spins and dyes, I did not so much learn this as absorb it, I too weave and spin and dye, I too understand the wind and the sky. I have a studio in downtown Toronto where I work at the angle of prayer, one eye on the weave one eye out the window, I see through the skyline in front of me unto the sky at home.

Tommy is beside me now, beside himself in a way, we are driving home through the snowstorm that only this morning replaced goodbye. I am telling him something that happened exactly a year after he left; he is the first to hear it.

I went to New York by mistake when I was 13 and nobody knew. 

We were at the airport, a school trip, and I heard my name: Stephanie Towers, it was infused with airport urgency, please report to gate three. I pulled away from my class and they flowed by without seeing me, I was used to being overlooked, I thought it was because I wasn’t pretty enough, Tommy said it was because I tended toward obedience.

I allowed myself to get shuffled into another life, of course I had the feeling something was wrong, but something was always wrong, I was used to dreams like this, nightmares in which I was dropped into unfamiliar situations, usually dire, where I had limited time to diffuse whatever peril I faced, always catastrophic.

I ended up in New York, where I retrieved Stephanie Flowers’ luggage, I’d already found her purse under my first-class seat, I followed her itinerary, checked in at her hotel, and in the morning I walked all the way to the Museum of Modern Art and used her pass. 

It blew my mind – this is not a euphemism – I went back to the museum all three days and achieved total decimation. I got pretty, ditched obedience, switched no into yes and yes into no.

I used the open-return ticket, such a cinch, and got to Ottawa airport with plenty of time to rejoin my class, someone said oh hi Steph, someone showed me something they had stolen, Mr. Harris winked at me, there was a kerfuffle about who sat next to me, when I read my Ottawa essay out loud in class the following week somebody whistled, a few people cheered, I got an A++.

One of my new friends’ uncle was a Buddhist, he lived in their basement, I managed to corner him, I asked him how coincidence was explained in Buddhism and he looked at me and said it wasn’t.

My lost weekend. A lesser nightmared 13-year-old would surely have been traumatized, but my trauma was not trauma at all, rather it was an exuberance, a deep gasping joy from which I got a head full of ragged ideas. 

I hadn’t known it possible to do such things, I had not thought they were allowed.

In an attempt to restore order to a world that went mad every night, I tied down the barn, I made wool rope thick as my leg, bore holes, dug loops, and tied that sucker to the ground, each corner a knot the size of a boulder. 

I haven’t had a nightmare since.

Now I work on a smaller scale, on life’s more private dangers.

THE COUNTING OF SHEEP

We keep driving, our silent heads on swivel.

Tommy used to run full-speed from the front door of the house across my green summer nightmares and over the cliff but there is nothing full-speed about him now. He is time-delayed.

Suddenly, urgently, I gasp: Did you try to come back?

That’s a great story..

Was your mother good to you?

Seven times the first year.

Another ship noses into the snow-globe.

His turn: What other preventative art did you make?

I didn’t know where you were.

A net. At the cliff.

She was mean as a badger.

Is she dead?

A net?

Three newly careless sheep fell into the net right away – this is not a nightmare – plunk, plunk, plunk one after the other and I couldn’t rescue them. I gathered hay and grass and tossed down water-saturated weaves every couple of days. They lived their lives suspended and died at the first ice storm, in as quick a succession as they had fallen. Mid-storm I shore the top rope and left the bottom as it was, tied at the base of two trees, three jagged white sheep cracked into the lake, and now the net hangs upside-down, I’ve seen it from a canoe like graph paper, funny little holes like each square’s a dice – portioned out swallows’ nests.

We both answer – YES! – our conversation like a weave.

I know my mother hears the squeaky tires and rushes to the kitchen window where she looks out from behind rooster curtains. Her lids fly open – she gains her years when this happens – when her lids are full of sky she looks no particular age, or perhaps all of them. She comes out the front door full-speed, I haven’t had this complete bowel-dropping fear since the nightmares, I have long-abandoned compartments that start to hinge open, she falls safely into Tommy’s stretched-out arms.

White on white Tommy and my mother, their puffs of love, I see it at the moment exactly as I will put it into wool. Reassurance remains at the heart of my work, I like to include elements of balance and stability, these are invisible, and wild textures together indicative of harmony, proof that love exists, and a trademark of mine, some say it’s the reason for their collectibility, I leave open ends, the last few inches encouraged to fray.

The rest of the day has the air of a dream, I tread softly, me and Tommy smoke cigarettes outside, we huddle near the house, the snow is three feet deep and still falling, you would never know there was anything in front of us but a white textured wall, the trees are visible but diminished, like thin scars. Once in a while the wind torques through Tourette’s Tunnel in a sharp curve that misses the barn, thankfully, but practically buries it in snow.

My gaping compartments sometimes crave a good nightmare.

WE HYPOTHETICAL CATS

I like the shadows birch make on the snow like gray bones. I like the eyelashes of far away cedar. I like the lake when it’s pancake ice, I can hear it now like a choo choo train, I love being snowed in.

Tommy is out by the barn chopping wood, my mother is happy in the kitchen cooking. She makes us spelt bread, saucy main courses, something with marrow, pies with lattice tops, vegetables shined with butter, she is humming o when the saints we have no power but kerosene for light, a fireplace, a wood stove o when the saints my mother has opened up the porch to the sheep o when the saints you never know how noisy a creature they are until you hear them on a wooden floor come marching in.

Tommy says I make woven art that consumes nightmares – such is his conclusion when I tell him of my city studio – but I know little about him. His backpack is large and titanium-framed, patched with crests from far-flung places, he will tell me when he tells me if he tells me, the patches are aged in increments, the most tattered barely reads Recherche Archipelago, the brightest is Pamukkale, Turkey.

I think his description of my work is a good one but I tell him I would use the word absorbs rather than consumes because they are neither gone nor are they present.

Okay Schrödinger, he says.

I laugh, but I am not the only cat here.

My mother comes in from the kitchen, I said before I am neutral to food but not this food, I am crazy for it, she puts the tray down on the coffee table, I hear it sizzle against the wood, this is my favourite food and she makes it for me every visit, hot dogs rolled inside dough. It tastes like we are 12, Tommy says. She sits across from us in the rocking chair that was my father’s, it’s too big for her, she looks like Shirley Temple dying to be grown up, her eyelids swell, she turns to Tommy who is beside me and angles her head, what do you do, Tom?

He is wearing my father’s sweaters, two of them at once, I smell Amphora Red pipe tobacco my father used to smoke, the sweaters have been in the weaving lineup for twenty years, sometimes she rolls strips of a shirt he wore into a weave, a shape of frayed plaid here, a waft of corduroy there, the red twill of a scarf, a long ripple of double-stitched denim.

Everything and nothing, he says.

The second cat lands.

We play Scrabble with our own rules, winter words only, they needn’t touch, we get 14 letters each, the scattered ones are face-up, the first word over 12 letters wins, if no such word is achieved it’s the old point system. Tommy gets “heartbreaking” and we give him the win without questioning the winterness of the word, we play again and again, eventually my mother goes to bed, we lay out words like shovel evergreen squall, despair anguish sorrow, we seem unlikely candidates for happiness, we hypothetical cats.

Again my question is urgent and real: How do you keep your nightmares away?

I don’t.

But when I go into his room that night he corrects himself.

I cross the hallway bare-footed, barely touching the cold floor, he opens his covers for me like a wing.

You never asked what my nightmares were about. Not once.

I never asked exactly but I got you to tell me.

Can I ask about yours?

He adjusts his wings.

I only had garden variety nightmares until I left here and every one since has been the same, foster kids go from house to house not home to home, this was the only home I ever had, my benchmark nightmare was leaving here. That’s why I stay on the move. That’s how I keep them away. You can’t lose a home you don’t have.

THE WORLD’S GREATEST VAGABOND

On the seventh day the snow stops falling, there can be no snow ever again, the reservoir is surely bone dry forever.

There is a pump house on our grid and it is attended by the municipality so our power is never out for long, but bright kerosene dots remain in my eyes so everything I see is adorned with blunt stars – it’s a familiar effect – I used to get Tommy’s spiraling silhouette like a daytime eclipse, I might be tending the sheep or running along Tourette’s Tunnel exuberantly swearing, and I would bang into it.

It’ll take a while for them to get to these roads. Mrs. Chalmers, our mayor and my mother’s friend calls, she’s the one who will dictate what gets plowed and when, my mother says no hurry I have everything I need, I hear please don’t ever come.

Today my mother is baking with our overflowing eggs. We have a poultricidal flock of chickens, we started with five when I was a kid and all these generations later we still have only five, they like to chase one another over the cliff and they squawk bloody murder all the way down.

The four hens are living in the back porch now as they do every winter, old Foghorn’s out there pacing and shitting, we throw him food into the deep snow and he tunnels all day, the snow rises as he goes, occasionally his head pops up for air like he’s swimming, he is most often the murderer.

Tommy says what’s that?

We are outside smoking. He points to a snowy spiral in the forest, and that, he points to another and then he sees they are everywhere, that that that, I tell him for the first time the nightmare of fluctuating gravity in which he climbed trees, gigantic gnarling misshapen things, and I’d wake up with the sound of his body landing in the soft grass, like swallowing water.

Jesus, he said.

They’re ladders, I squint.

Of course they are.

My turn: Where will you go next?

Uruguay in January.

The words are like a weave, uruguayinjanuary, warpinweft, januaryinuruguay, weftinwarp.

I’ve noticed his parka, his boots, gloves, goggles, his laptop, the titanium backpack that weighs less than nothing, I don’t ask, but there is something between weavers, my mother stops cracking eggs into the batter, she takes the wool, she turns and says URUGUAY? How on earth can you afford it Tom?

Like a card shark he pours onto the kitchen table between hot dogs and stew his credentials, he writes for National Geographic, Thomas V. Dove.

Of all the warps and wefts and sudden silhouettes this week has begat, all the upside-down snow, the blunted stars now sharp, the windy profanity from Tourette’s Tunnel, the only true miracle is Tommy’s astonishing life.

EVERYTHING WE SHORE

All of Grumbacher’s efforts fall short, there is no painterly name for this sky, this is the science of reflection and refraction, not to be romanticized unless by mythology – I would call the colour Icarus.

Mrs. Chalmers says the roads will be clear tomorrow, there’s an igloo-shaped building near the pump-house full of beach sand they will pour over the roads but studded tires are necessary, mine are not, so Tommy’s been working in the barn forging chains for them instead, he reveals himself to be master of much, I hear the tink tink of his hammer in the very top folds of my brain like the highest key on the piano, the beat goes on.

Have you any wool, my mother asks and my ridiculous answer I say in purposeful monotone, three bags full.

Enough until spring?

I think so.

The barn is hot, you could shore some this afternoon.

I can feel it already the fresh wool and what it releases.

I will do Glory, I say.

Our finest sheep. I will let her out into the atmosphere for a few hours this morning, a practice that enhances the wool especially in winter. I throw on a coat and run along the trodden path to the barn, oh! the piece I will make in Icarus!

It is early and the sky is gray but for a hot shock of pink that lights up the thin horizon, tink tink, I pull the door open into the dark humidity and stench, the sheep shuffle, Tommy is hammering in the tucked away cave my father built for forging. He smiles through the doorway, I take Glory into the morning, my hand on her neck, her strands of hair reflect for the moment the light but will soon accept it.

We have to push the snow away with our bodies, it’s up to my thighs and Glory’s chest, in her eyes the horizon arches and the clouds swell, her breath is white, her mouth frosty, the snow is dry and light. Tommy told us last night about similar snow he encountered skiing the Mweka route on Kilimanjaro where no skiing is allowed, part of his style of journalism is breaking these rules but he told us he doesn’t break them, that he has the utmost respect for these sorts of rules, that it’s the editors who like to portray him a rogue, in reality he bought permission with a ten thousand dollar donation to the National Park, courtesy of the magazine.

AN IMPROPER ENDING

Literary pedanticism is deadly, I was going to give this story a proper ending, with goodbyes and intentions, give us false mouths full of normalcy and then wrap it up like a good writer should, but there is a greater resolution that came to me just this morning on my way home from yoga, I had to lower my window and breathe. 

Ujjayi breath. Lion’s breath. Roar.

I know it’s futile to put into words the manipulation of time, it’s like explaining how the atmosphere from home comes when I weave Glory’s wool, for the colour of Icarus is in the mind alone, yet only hours ago, true time, I realized what happened those snowed-in days with my mother and Tommy, there is validity when a phenomenon occurs in three minds simultaneously and unknowingly, we shore the years into practically nothing.

She Loves Me She Loves Me Not by Sherry Cassells
Part One of The Wallflower

I have soft shoulders, my mother says I am afraid of shadows, she is a literary snob who calls me The Child of Shalott. I hear her soaked lips spread across her teeth, it is getting dark, one day past summer solstice, one drink in, and I am for a short time the apple of her eye. She invites me to sit on the chair with her, there’s no room but I pretend to fit, my filthy summer knees with knobs of insect bites next to hers, a thin and pale eleven, like me.

This is the childhood I remember, the window I can today see through, I have learned that if I keep this imaginary window clear of clutter and debris I can return to the sprawling gardens of my childhood, my mother would have shoved the word privileged before childhood, like most people she believed wealth and privilege were the same thing.

Peace in the twilight of a generous backyard – fireflies light, butterflies collapse, breezes flare, the heave of nearby shores – I recall all of it.

My mother smelled of damp roses and gin, my head rested upon her soft shoulder, I squinted into the partial sun. I can hear her mouth open, the way she took in the last of the light and exhaled it in a sweet column of alto, somewhere on the flat cusp between hymn and dirge, her throat hugged the notes with acute control, she could torque it to soprano at any time. It felt, and I remember this deeply, as if a balloon were about to burst as I waited, grateful when it didn’t come, I preferred she save that shrill for the stage.

The gardens were many, they were beautiful and brief, we stayed five weeks in Barcelona once, long enough to see the midnight blue Irises into flower and back again. Usually we stayed in place for two weeks, my mother and I, as well as the supplied chefs, maids and gardeners, and her manager Mrs. Buettner who wore midi dresses always, one sleeve long and fastened at her wrist, the other short and gathered at her elbow. I’d seen her at bedtime and her nightgown was the same. The numbers on her forearm were blurred and indistinguishable, I only asked once, she said they spelled out hell, and my mother cleared her throat. Everyone took notice when my mother cleared her throat. Mrs. Buettner inflated sharply, I pressed against her, she was my closest, my only, friend.

My busy mother left me to either Mrs. Buettner or the tepid pool of maids. Too young to disbelieve my intuition I understood languages, and aside from being served shell-accompanied slime once when I’d ordered a hot dog, my words were understood. Things I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about I couldn’t communicate, once a gentlemen asked me what my famous mother was, and I replied, in Spanish, a polish hen.

He smiled, his teeth were too big for him, I found it hilarious and we laughed together, he at my poltricidal accusations, me at his teeth, I urged Mrs. Buettner to get me something to draw with and I built that man from nothing to something over and over again, each time I laughed.

Whoever he is, he is visible through the aforementioned window, and although I only saw him once, his face may be the first I recognize in heaven.

In a bit of a balloon over this one, there's something about releasing part one of a story that's unfinished, I've been writing maybe 600 words each of the past three days, I am on part four today and will finish tomorrow. It's all I think about. It's all I want to think about. My other life (which I love btw) is on a sort of hold, up in the air a little, there’s your balloon reference.

She Loves Me She Loves Me Not by Sherry Cassells
Part One of The Wallflower

I have soft shoulders, my mother says I am afraid of shadows, she is a literary snob who calls me The Child of Shalott. I hear her soaked lips spread across her teeth, it is getting dark, one day past summer solstice, one drink in, and I am for a short time the apple of her eye. She invites me to sit on the chair with her, there’s no room but I pretend to fit, my filthy summer knees with knobs of insect bites next to hers, a thin and pale eleven, like me.

This is the childhood I remember, the window I can today see through, I have learned that if I keep this imaginary window clear of clutter and debris I can return to the sprawling gardens of my childhood, my mother would have shoved the word privileged before childhood, like most people she believed wealth and privilege were the same thing.

Peace in the twilight of a generous backyard – fireflies light, butterflies collapse, breezes flare, the heave of nearby shores – I recall all of it.

My mother smelled of damp roses and gin, my head rested upon her soft shoulder, I squinted into the partial sun. I can hear her mouth open, the way she took in the last of the light and exhaled it in a sweet column of alto, somewhere on the flat cusp between hymn and dirge, her throat hugged the notes with acute control, she could torque it to soprano at any time. It felt, and I remember this deeply, as if a balloon were about to burst as I waited, grateful when it didn’t come, I preferred she save that shrill for the stage.

The gardens were many, they were beautiful and brief, we stayed five weeks in Barcelona once, long enough to see the midnight blue Irises into flower and back again. Usually we stayed in place for two weeks, my mother and I, as well as the supplied chefs, maids and gardeners, and her manager Mrs. Buettner who wore midi dresses always, one sleeve long and fastened at her wrist, the other short and gathered at her elbow. I’d seen her at bedtime and her nightgown was the same. The numbers on her forearm were blurred and indistinguishable, I only asked once, she said they spelled out hell, and my mother cleared her throat. Everyone took notice when my mother cleared her throat. Mrs. Buettner inflated sharply, I pressed against her, she was my closest, my only, friend.

My busy mother left me to either Mrs. Buettner or the tepid pool of maids. Too young to disbelieve my intuition I understood languages, and aside from being served shell-accompanied slime once when I’d ordered a hot dog, my words were understood. Things I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about I couldn’t communicate, once a gentlemen asked me what my famous mother was, and I replied, in Spanish, a polish hen.

He smiled, his teeth were too big for him, I found it hilarious and we laughed together, he at my poltricidal accusations, me at his teeth, I urged Mrs. Buettner to get me something to draw with and I built that man from nothing to something over and over again, each time I laughed.

Whoever he is, he is visible through the aforementioned window, and although I only saw him once, his face may be the first I recognize in heaven.

I wrote the opening sentence to this story the opposite way the first time and it sat there looking at me and I sat here looking at it, something popped up on my screen about a fringed summer vest, I’m a sucker for fringes and vests and summer, then I came back to the sentence, switched it to this one, and kept going – the sun rose – and I finished it. So here. Dive in. It’s fresh as can be…

The One That Summer by Sherry Cassells

Everybody remembered Amy but I tried to forget her, or at least remember her in a normal way. I was hoping for amnesia – I know how that sounds and I can do worse – I was in need of an amputation.

I knew where my father kept relief. It was in a bottle under the kitchen sink, at the back, next to the Comet, some squeezed out rags, a jar of turtle food nobody would throw out because what if our missing turtle popped up from the couch one night during Bonanza like our hamster had, fatter than before, he could have lived forever on the crumbs in our orange sofa. My father was sprawled there some mornings, his fallen trousers exposing the striped boxer shorts I knew from the clothesline.

Amy came for the summer. Doesn’t that sound fun? Amy came for the summer. Lemon Up and fumbles. We were fourteen.

She was my mother’s best friend’s daughter and we knew each other but didn’t. We were chubby and spitty and distracted in a slew of photographs as impersonal as X-rays. We looked dirty and stupid, in one we had identical snot bubbles, some we were naked, every so often one of us in a Santa hat the other with a Rudolph nose, you couldn’t tell who was who, we were usually crying. Our mothers documented our babyhoods, one of them behind the shaky camera, one of them in the background wearing oval polka-dots, flares from the flash stuck to her wine glass as if she were holding a flying saucer, you couldn’t tell who was who.

That September I went to high school drunk, brave, and popular. My mother always watered down my father’s whiskey but with both of us doing it my father came out of his fog long enough to notice, he changed cupboards and our game of hide-and-seek began, it continues today, although I am approaching middle-age if I live to be 132.

Still I can’t forget Amy.

My father’s world is distorted in a different way now, our games involve his hide-and-seek memory, sometimes real things such as his glasses or his wallet, both useless but he wants them near, his short-term memory is shot to shit – who cares anyway what he did yesterday or last month, who came by over Christmas, what episode of Columbo – some things should be a muddle. But he remembers swimming in Lake Superior he dunks me over and over, again and again he tells me the way the world changed when he was in the water – and he did not mean his perspective but that the world actually changed shape for him – it became stark and joyful and beautiful. For real he said straight into my eyes and he, for that moment, returned.

Yesterday he mentioned Amy, not by name, he called her the girl I loved.

I am 66 and have loved many girls, I laughed, I asked him to narrow it down a bit and he said the one you got drunk with but I needed further clarification, that was well-danced terrain, so he said the one that summer.

Amy came into my head like a cool jewel, and I suddenly knew, I finally understood what he meant about swimming, for my world changed at the thought of her.

If you want to take a look around the rest of the site, please do so here, there are lots of juicy bits to read

This is Chapter 5 of The Fields Next Door. If you’re not following along you can start from the beginning here, or if you want to wing it, these points will help situate you:

– narrator is Clayton Handsome Chayn who grew up with his grandparents on a farm

– his new-found sister and his newish wife are both named Daisy Chayn

– he and his wife were neighbours, after they married he moved into her house, his house is now empty

– his sister wears heavy-duty braces (that catch the light and serve as antenna)

– the raisins are natural, pale diamonds (found in the field next door)

– fuzzy photograph is of grandparents at their new home in South America

The Fields Next Door by Sherry Cassells

My wife saw Daisy’s necklace just as I did.

I am the slower one, I was still marvelling that this toothy girl across the table from me was the very blemish in the fuzzy photograph I’d nailed to the kitchen wall, my wife dashed to the table and hobbled her chair so close to my sister she balked, she swooped to the young white neck like a vampire to blood, she screeched ah-haa! and in homonymic harmony my sister screeched the same, hers for fear, my wife’s for discovery. She looked at me and invited by gesture that I study the raisins but there was no need, I already understood, my grandparents had known all along about the diamonds and the existence of a granddaughter, why they had chosen to keep their finds to themselves I thought about slowly and to no avail.

My exhausted sister soon went for a nap, she left her practically soleless shoes in an over easy X beneath the kitchen table, I noticed a red frill around the holes and believed it to be layers of worn sole but I soon began to notice unpickupable petals strewn about the floor and realized my poor sister’s feet bled. I had not until then wondered how she had arrived at our house but it seemed clear now that she had walked, no wonder she slept through lunch, it wasn’t until I was cooking dinner when she opened the door of the balloon bedroom, her yawn flared with the streaming solstice sun, she came to the kitchen stumbling with sleep, tripped over nothing, I said oops-a-Daisy as one does, and although serializing this story had not yet occurred to me, something within me must have known, for to avoid duplication and confusion, my sister’s altername was born – for this story, for this day, this moment.

My wife had been out painting the porch which she did every solstice, yellow, she came in the house and into the kitchen where she herself tripped over her own nothing, she said oops-a-Daisy, and before she steadied herself the wet paintbrush slapped against the fuzzy photograph and made a perfectly round blot, my grandparents gone forever. Seeing what she had done my wife again said oops-a-Daisy more severely this time, my sister took to her new name immediately, I had not announced it nor suggested it in any way, she turned from the table beneath which her worn feet had slipped into their worn shoes among the petals, she looked at my wife and said yes?

We each ate a fresh trout – did I mention the lake? – Oopsa asked for seconds but I had caught only three, I told her as much and she said my brother is a fisherman and as I was sitting right next to her I said Veronica Lake makes everyone a fisherman, the trout are eager if not foolish. She laughed. No, brother, not you, I mean my other brother. Daisy looked up from her trout which she had been working on with enormous enjoyment, she said what other brother? and Oopsa said as if she were commenting only on the weather when clement, Clayton Handsome Chayn.

That was the moment when I realized my wife and I, Daisy Mae Chayn and Clayton Handsome Chayn, of Witchita Falls, Ontario, did not exist.

You might think this story would take a turn now, that me and Daisy would fight for existence in the world, that I would go on and on about the supernatural or delve into the dreaded science fiction realm for excuse over explanation, that you would find out it’s all not only false but impossible, that I’ve been lying my head off all along.

But no.

When one is presented with the prospect of being a ghost there are options.

I N T E R L U D E

They say to make an outline first so your story does not get out of control but I fucking live for that challenge, I have no idea what’s coming until it arrives and then I manage it like plates in the air, am typing like mad right now looking out the window where it's still dark, I can hear the birds, my cat is wagging her paw beneath my closed door, asking if this is turning into a ghost story are we in or are we out?

– h a n g i n t h e r e –

There’s a fine line where ghosts stand not unlike the line from Peter Pan that says about disbelieved-in fairies falling down dead, the ghosts will either fade or become opaque.

– o n e m o r e t h i n g –

This has happened before.

R E S U M E

When I caught my wife’s eye there was a tear in it, she realized at the same moment what we were when we traipsed through the fields next door at night gathering stones. We did not at the moment wish to analyze our situation, but only to remain present, for we breathed, we loved, we ate, we drank, we knitted, we learned, we managed, we welcomed, we watched Murder, She Wrote that night with perfect reception, blurred commercials when Ooopsa went to the kitchen for a single stalk of rhubarb each time, she came in and broke them into three, Daisy had quickly knitted her up some healing slippers so nothing was in her wake but a few grains of the sugar she had sprinkled into the rhubarb’s gutter which she wet with spit from her tongue.

In the morning, my sister was gone.

I leaned hard left that day as if listening to the wind for the coordinates of my sweet sister, and where on earth was the brother she spoke of, our field is restless, the corn blows one way in a gigantic wave, and ripples back to the tornadoed centre, it is a stormy sea and we, my wife and I, sit on the dock in our Adirondack chairs which ping from side to side – and it catches me – something red in the corner of my eye, I half-expect a pirate’s sail, slowly I turn toward the fields next door.

But it is not a pirate ship and this is not the sea, we come to stillness and the dock is again a porch, the red is the moat around my old house which contains roses again, before my eyes one then another spark to colour, do not worry this will not take a fairy-tale turn but for a quick mention, suddenly the windows of the kitchen which never before opened, open, and a soft arm comes out with a watering can, a Snow White-like profile in the dawn, water falls onto the roses and they respond as if their flowers are mouths, they drink, squiggle and bloom, she turns my way, east, the rising sun catches her mouth in an atom-bomb smile.

My sister Oopsa waves with her free hand and hollers, I can barely hear the words and would not know them had I not heard them all my life. The syllables come in spite of the distance, it’s my name, I smile and wave as if she is sending me a personal salutation but then I put together, in a dash of retrospect, the words that come after it, just as my recovering wife, she is prone to seasickness, sings the same words in a weak display of homonymic harmony, Clayton Handsome Chayn is coming today!

There are writers who make outlines and writers who don’t. I’m a don’t. Of course an outline would make things easier and less hectic, so would paying my bills on time and figuring out what to wear before it's time to zoom out the door without my keys/wallet/glasses.

This is Chapter 5 of The Fields Next Door. If you’re not following along you can start from the beginning here, or if you want to wing it, these points will help situate you:

– narrator is Clayton Handsome Chayn who grew up with his grandparents on a farm

– his new-found sister and his newish wife are both named Daisy Chayn

– he and his wife were neighbours, after they married he moved into her house, his house is now empty

– his sister wears heavy-duty braces (that catch the light and serve as antenna)

– the raisins are natural, pale diamonds (found in the field next door)

– fuzzy photograph is of grandparents at their new home in South America

This one’s is a total wing, hope you enjoy the ride.

Thanks for being here.

The Fields Next Door by Sherry Cassells

Chapter 5

My wife saw Daisy’s necklace just as I did.

I am the slower one, I was still marvelling that this toothy girl across the table from me was the very blemish in the fuzzy photograph I’d nailed to the kitchen wall, my wife dashed to the table and hobbled her chair so close to my sister she balked, she swooped to the young white neck like a vampire to blood, she screeched ah-haa! and in homonymic harmony my sister screeched the same, hers for fear, my wife’s for discovery. She looked at me and invited by gesture that I study the raisins but there was no need, I already understood, my grandparents had known all along about the diamonds and the existence of a granddaughter, why they had chosen to keep their finds to themselves I thought about slowly and to no avail.

My exhausted sister soon went for a nap, she left her practically soleless shoes in an over easy X beneath the kitchen table, I noticed a red frill around the holes and believed it to be layers of worn sole but I soon began to notice unpickupable petals strewn about the floor and realized my poor sister’s feet bled. I had not until then wondered how she had arrived at our house but it seemed clear now that she had walked, no wonder she slept through lunch, it wasn’t until I was cooking dinner when she opened the door of the balloon bedroom, her yawn flared with the streaming solstice sun, she came to the kitchen stumbling with sleep, tripped over nothing, I said oops-a-Daisy as one does, and although serializing this story had not yet occurred to me, something within me must have known, for to avoid duplication and confusion, my sister’s altername was born – for this story, for this day, this moment.

My wife had been out painting the porch which she did every solstice, yellow, she came in the house and into the kitchen where she herself tripped over her own nothing, she said oops-a-Daisy, and before she steadied herself the wet paintbrush slapped against the fuzzy photograph and made a perfectly round blot, my grandparents gone forever. Seeing what she had done my wife again said oops-a-Daisy more severely this time, my sister took to her new name immediately, I had not announced it nor suggested it in any way, she turned from the table beneath which her worn feet had slipped into their worn shoes among the petals, she looked at my wife and said yes?

We each ate a fresh trout – did I mention the lake? – Oopsa asked for seconds but I had caught only three, I told her as much and she said my brother is a fisherman and as I was sitting right next to her I said Veronica Lake makes everyone a fisherman, the trout are eager if not foolish. She laughed. No, brother, not you, I mean my other brother. Daisy looked up from her trout which she had been working on with enormous enjoyment, she said what other brother? and Oopsa said as if she were commenting only on the weather when clement, Clayton Handsome Chayn.

That was the moment when I realized my wife and I, Daisy Mae Chayn and Clayton Handsome Chayn, of Witchita Falls, Ontario, did not exist.

You might think this story would take a turn now, that me and Daisy would fight for existence in the world, that I would go on and on about the supernatural or delve into the dreaded science fiction realm for excuse over explanation, that you would find out it’s all not only false but impossible, that I’ve been lying my head off all along.

But no.

When one is presented with the prospect of being a ghost there are options.

I N T E R L U D E

They say to make an outline first so your story does not get out of control but I fucking live for that challenge, I have no idea what’s coming until it arrives and then I manage it like plates in the air, am typing like mad right now looking out the window where it's still dark, I can hear the birds, my cat is wagging her paw beneath my closed door, asking if this is turning into a ghost story are we in or are we out?

– h a n g i n t h e r e –

There’s a fine line where ghosts stand not unlike the line from Peter Pan that says about disbelieved-in fairies falling down dead, the ghosts will either fade or become opaque.

– o n e m o r e t h i n g –

This has happened before.

R E S U M E

When I caught my wife’s eye there was a tear in it, she realized at the same moment what we were when we traipsed through the fields next door at night gathering stones. We did not at the moment wish to analyze our situation, but only to remain present, for we breathed, we loved, we ate, we drank, we knitted, we learned, we managed, we welcomed, we watched Murder, She Wrote that night with perfect reception, blurred commercials when Ooopsa went to the kitchen for a single stalk of rhubarb each time, she came in and broke them into three, Daisy had quickly knitted her up some healing slippers so nothing was in her wake but a few grains of the sugar she had sprinkled into the rhubarb’s gutter which she wet with spit from her tongue.

In the morning, my sister was gone.

I leaned hard left that day as if listening to the wind for the coordinates of my sweet sister, and where on earth was the brother she spoke of, our field is restless, the corn blows one way in a gigantic wave, and ripples back to the tornadoed centre, it is a stormy sea and we, my wife and I, sit on the dock in our Adirondack chairs which ping from side to side – and it catches me – something red in the corner of my eye, I half-expect a pirate’s sail, slowly I turn toward the fields next door.

But it is not a pirate ship and this is not the sea, we come to stillness and the dock is again a porch, the red is the moat around my old house which contains roses again, before my eyes one then another spark to colour, do not worry this will not take a fairy-tale turn but for a quick mention, suddenly the windows of the kitchen which never before opened, open, and a soft arm comes out with a watering can, a Snow White-like profile in the dawn, water falls onto the roses and they respond as if their flowers are mouths, they drink, squiggle and bloom, she turns my way, east, the rising sun catches her mouth in an atom-bomb smile.

My sister Oopsa waves with her free hand and hollers, I can barely hear the words and would not know them had I not heard them all my life. The syllables come in spite of the distance, it’s my name, I smile and wave as if she is sending me a personal salutation but then I put together, in a dash of retrospect, the words that come after it, just as my recovering wife, she is prone to seasickness, sings the same words in a weak display of homonymic harmony, Clayton Handsome Chayn is coming today!

To Give Away The Farm by Sherry Cassells

I know it can’t be true but it’s not exactly bullshit either.

Uncle Max, I was named after him, he told us kids that he had delayed hearing.

People thought there was something wrong with him but our mother said it was only that he was more thoughtful than most men, he used to be impulsive she explained, too quick to bring home wounded animals they could do nothing for, so many cats and dogs and other strays, including our father. A parrot once landed on his shoulder and this was northern Ontario where it’s mostly hawks and ravens, he asked around and nobody was missing a parrot, they thought it was the set-up to a new kind of knock knock joke, and those of them who thought he was simple asked parrot who?

Parrot Who is still alive, he's mine now, I let him go every summer and he comes back on cool nights, and returns for good the morning of September first each year like calendarwork. He stands on my shoulder and together we look out small windows unto the great northern snowfalls.

Uncle Max didn’t laugh at our jokes right way, it took him a long time to say yes or no when my mother asked if he wanted gravy or would he be spending the night. Mrs. Blackwell taught at our school and was his girlfriend for a while, we died laughing when she came over in a sundress, her ageing hand resting on his knee, she said he had staircase wit – do you know what that is? – it’s when you get the perfect comeback too late, you think of it on the way up to bed, the person your words would have decimated long gone.

Uncle Max worked for the department of transportation in White, Ontario, drilling and blasting through the Canadian Shield to make way for the roads. He was on the committee responsible, so there’s a road named after each of us – Shirley Drive, Little Max Pass, and the one named after Dev was like a game of telephone – remember those hot whispers you had to listen so carefully and then pour what you thought you heard into the next ear? What started as Devon's Gale Road ended up Devil’s Gap Road.

The other day Shirley said I think I’m going deaf like Uncle Max and she sort of shook her fists at heaven, there was still something of an optimist in her I suppose, I said Uncle Max wasn’t deaf.

She hated that I had the better memory, she pounded her mug on the coffee table stump between us and stared straight ahead, my sister always had her dukes up. We were at the farm where we grew up, we met there on weekends pretty often, not so much to spend time together as to get the place ready to sell, or at least that’s what we told ourselves, but we rarely got anything done. In spite of our mediocre intentions, we usually just basked. Dev lived farther away and came less often, when he did show up there was always a fight between him and Shirley who he called Squirrelly all his life, and you’d think she’d have been used to it but no, every time she bristled freshly about it, she tried calling him Devil but he liked it.

I’m supposed to meet them here today, Shirley’s got Mrs. Blackwell coming. Mrs. Blackwell was, in rapid succession, first Shirley’s, then mine, then Dev’s grade three teacher, she gave it up for real estate. Shirley hadn’t let on until a quick phone call this morning and when I protested she said it is what it is whatever the fuck that means.

They arrive at the same time, I hear Dev squeal Squirrelly! and she says fuck off, Dev.

First thing I say is I don’t want to give this place up. I fling my arms toward the fields, all overgrown but fully gorgeous nonetheless, vague checkerboards, some purple with clover and fragrant, others leaning with tall grasses, some producing weirdly tall stalks of errant corn, gigantic walnut trees bubble all across the horizon, three pale barns, it’s ours as far as you can see all ways. We grew up here. It runs through each of us like blood, our feet are planted, something in our cores move with the clover, the spikes of corn, the grasses lean, the bubbles, scent after shape after shade.

We all love this place Shirley says but the market’s high right now, it’s actually peaking Mrs. Blackwell said, and look at the house. In pecking order we turn, one two three, and yes, it is old and creaky and dry and cracked and faded and longing and beautiful. It’ll cost a fortune to fix, I don’t know about you guys but I don’t have a fortune. We talk some more, Dev’s the one who sways me, he says Squirrelly’s right you know Max and it's the first time he’s ever said that.

We love the farm. But before Mrs. Blackwell drives up the driveway we decide to sell, she has a buyer she says right away, somebody who already knows the farm, they don’t even have to see it, fair price, fair everything, before we know it we are sitting around the kitchen table, Shirley in her chair, me in mine, Dev in dad’s signing papers.

Uncle Max detonated the explosion from two hundred feet away. The strange part was the silence – he said it felt unreal, prolonged, disconnected – it was not until things were in mid-air he said that you heard the explosion at all.





.

I've seen posts where people ask what's your favourite opening line and I always always always say Rebecca! Daphne DuMaurier! Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again!

I like not seeing some movies. I don’t want to waste a good story and all those bumpy delicious surprises you get with a good book. Movies go too fast, you have no control. Am currently reading A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean. Turns out it’s one in a complication of short stories – that is such a beautiful and sincere little autocorrect I'm leaving it – and since you asked, here’s my new favourite opening line: In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.

I love that. My father was a fly fisherman and I understand the devotion.

When you fly fish you have to think like a fish, with an opening line you have to think like a fisherman.

Thanks for being here.

To Give Away The Farm by Sherry Cassells

I know it can’t be true but it’s not exactly bullshit either.

Uncle Max, I was named after him, he told us kids that he had delayed hearing.

People thought there was something wrong with him but our mother said it was only that he was more thoughtful than most men, he used to be impulsive she explained, too quick to bring home wounded animals they could do nothing for, so many cats and dogs and other strays, including our father. A parrot once landed on his shoulder and this was northern Ontario where it’s mostly hawks and ravens, he asked around and nobody was missing a parrot, they thought it was the set-up to a new kind of knock knock joke, and those of them who thought he was simple asked parrot who?

Parrot Who is still alive, he's mine now, I let him go every summer and he comes back on cool nights, and returns for good the morning of September first each year like calendarwork. He stands on my shoulder and together we look out small windows unto the great northern snowfalls.

Uncle Max didn’t laugh at our jokes right way, it took him a long time to say yes or no when my mother asked if he wanted gravy or would he be spending the night. Mrs. Blackwell taught at our school and was his girlfriend for a while, we died laughing when she came over in a sundress, her ageing hand resting on his knee, she said he had staircase wit – do you know what that is? – it’s when you get the perfect comeback too late, you think of it on the way up to bed, the person your words would have decimated long gone.

Uncle Max worked for the department of transportation in White, Ontario, drilling and blasting through the Canadian Shield to make way for the roads. He was on the committee responsible, so there’s a road named after each of us – Shirley Drive, Little Max Pass, and the one named after Dev was like a game of telephone – remember those hot whispers you had to listen so carefully and then pour what you thought you heard into the next ear? What started as Devon's Gale Road ended up Devil’s Gap Road.

The other day Shirley said I think I’m going deaf like Uncle Max and she sort of shook her fists at heaven, there was still something of an optimist in her I suppose, I said Uncle Max wasn’t deaf.

She hated that I had the better memory, she pounded her mug on the coffee table stump between us and stared straight ahead, my sister always had her dukes up. We were at the farm where we grew up, we met there on weekends pretty often, not so much to spend time together as to get the place ready to sell, or at least that’s what we told ourselves, but we rarely got anything done. In spite of our mediocre intentions, we usually just basked. Dev lived farther away and came less often, when he did show up there was always a fight between him and Shirley who he called Squirrelly all his life, and you’d think she’d have been used to it but no, every time she bristled freshly about it, she tried calling him Devil but he liked it.

I’m supposed to meet them here today, Shirley’s got Mrs. Blackwell coming. Mrs. Blackwell was, in rapid succession, first Shirley’s, then mine, then Dev’s grade three teacher, she gave it up for real estate. Shirley hadn’t let on until a quick phone call this morning and when I protested she said it is what it is whatever the fuck that means.

They arrive at the same time, I hear Dev squeal Squirrelly! and she says fuck off, Dev.

First thing I say is I don’t want to give this place up. I fling my arms toward the fields, all overgrown but fully gorgeous nonetheless, vague checkerboards, some purple with clover and fragrant, others leaning with tall grasses, some producing weirdly tall stalks of errant corn, gigantic walnut trees bubble all across the horizon, three pale barns, it’s ours as far as you can see all ways. We grew up here. It runs through each of us like blood, our feet are planted, something in our cores move with the clover, the spikes of corn, the grasses lean, the bubbles, scent after shape after shade.

We all love this place Shirley says but the market’s high right now, it’s actually peaking Mrs. Blackwell said, and look at the house. In pecking order we turn, one two three, and yes, it is old and creaky and dry and cracked and faded and longing and beautiful. It’ll cost a fortune to fix, I don’t know about you guys but I don’t have a fortune. We talk some more, Dev’s the one who sways me, he says Squirrelly’s right you know Max and it's the first time he’s ever said that.

We love the farm. But before Mrs. Blackwell drives up the driveway we decide to sell, she has a buyer she says right away, somebody who already knows the farm, they don’t even have to see it, fair price, fair everything, before we know it we are sitting around the kitchen table, Shirley in her chair, me in mine, Dev in dad’s signing papers.

Uncle Max detonated the explosion from two hundred feet away. The strange part was the silence – he said it felt unreal, prolonged, disconnected – it was not until things were in mid-air he said that you heard the explosion at all.

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.

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.

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.

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.