Theo waits

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

Thanks for being here.

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

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

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

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

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

I mean seriously.

I make people up so that I can love them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BIG HALF

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

Do you think I ask too many questions?

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

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

Thanks for being here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When my mother died I half-died, too.

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

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

Good question.

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

Mrs. Peel was the third person at the cottage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ZIGGY TUPPER

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

Thanks for being here.

Ziggy Tupper by Sherry Cassells

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

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

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

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

I ran up to my room.

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

I looked out the window to the empty sidewalk.

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

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

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

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

A whispering horse.

Every so often a perfect day with Claire.

100 per year for 30 years there are thousands.

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

SHELLL

Don’t you just love Saturday mornings?

Shelll by Sherry Cassellls

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

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

I was 12.

Q: How many syllables are in the word twelve?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overnight

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for being here.

Overnight by Sherry Cassells

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

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

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

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

I had mixed feelings about it.

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

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

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

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

Not everybody knew he’d quit his job.

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

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

Those long hallways.

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

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

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

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

Autumn corrected

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

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

Thanks for being here.

by Sherry Cassells

Can you stand one more story about the Sea?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I found his stories unbelievable yet I believed them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was eventually taken by the sea, too.

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

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

AS IF TO THE SEA

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

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

Thanks for being here.

As If To The Sea by Sherry Cassells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enormous. It was enormous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

more stories here

The Pearl

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

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

Thanks for being here.

The Pearl by Sherry Cassells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Aunty Pearl.

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

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

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

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

Whatever people needed. Whatever she needed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

––––––––––––––––––––––––

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

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The Antidote To Everything

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

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

Excuse my language.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I remember looking down the throat of a wild tulip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO ABHOR THE SEA

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

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

Thanks for being here.

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

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

The sea was all we had.

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

I abhor the sea, she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our visits were different after that.

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

Gave her hope my father said on the way home.

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

No. Probably not.

What then? Hope for what?

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

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

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

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

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

a package from home

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

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

Thanks for being here.

A Package from Home by Sherry Cassells

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

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

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

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

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

WHO?

Contrary to everything I said last time, I’ve decided to not post past stories, there’s less joy in that for me. I want to give you the immediate ones, the imperfect ones that carry a sort of fucked up beauty I hope, accompanied by grammatical tics and messy audio and excessive enthusiasm and birds in the background when possible. It’s 6:41 on a Sunday morning in September and I just wrote this. Thanks for being here.

Who? by Sherry Cassells

Are owls birds? You’d almost certainly answer yes to that one until you felt the weight of one and then you’d reconsider. Is there a category for more meaty flyers? Owls are the whales of the night sky, and the who who who is you you you.

I'm back in the town where I grew up. It's been twelve years.

I heard the first owl around midnight, solo for a long time, and then another, and a while later, a third. I waited for more, I was sort of building the Big Dipper one star at a time in my night-head but it stopped at three and I closed the triangle. I could have slept, I caught myself rolling from slumber's ledge a couple of times, but I got up instead, and for a moment I didn’t remember where I was. I only got here yesterday.

When I opened the door to the back yard it felt like I was breaking a seal.

I stepped onto the cool concrete, felt wet but wasn’t, my eyes rode the horizon like watching the needle go across a record – there was no distinction of colour but a barely there thread of pale – the involuntary scan I do for my mother’s ghost.

Wait. I'm not even sure I believe in ghosts, it's what I do to catch a trace of her that's all. I was young when she died and I forget things, not sure what I am scanning for exactly, maybe it’s a shape like something on a clothesline, maybe it’s the owls ‘triangle or could be the release of another kind of seal.

Whatever it is, I am always on the prowl.

So you’re nocturnal too?

I turned and she was standing there smoking. Auntie Jane. I didn't know she smoked. She used to hassle my mother so much about it, I’m shocked she took it up.

I didn’t answer – all questions are rhetorical at night, just ask the owls – but I went to her and leaned against the fence beside her, I could see the moon, I purposefully do not know the rules of the sky, the moon is always a surprise to me, I see no consistency, nothing precise, only fickle stars, I don’t trust the joints of the star-shapes for which there are names, I mentioned the Big Dipper earlier as if I were imagining it with accuracy but I wasn’t, just the open scoop part hovered at a questionable angle, I only said it to explain the moment so you’d maybe understand the way the who who who landed.

We hadn’t said much during dinner, much of importance I mean, we talked about vegetables, the lamb sort of glided down my throat, I told her I’d never had anything so delicious, we talked about my mother but it was in a forced way, I suppose we were clumsily breaking ice, she said I looked like her and I said so do you.

But that night in the back yard darkness we had plenty to say, we enjoyed a lengthy and intricate weave of conversation, much of it without the weight of words, it was a pulsating exchange of truth and relief, one of us said twelve years is a long time, the other said what took you so long. I don't know how many times we repeated those two lines, it became a sort of row row row your boat round during which we switched lyrics seamlessly.

Plenty of background birds in a slideshow sky.

We talked about how I’d been searching without searching, wanting without wanting, trying without trying, and ready finally ready.

I went back to bed in a moment of purple, what’s that poem? –  and miles to go before I sleep – that’s how it felt, the distance between the back yard and my bed felt immeasurable. People say I went to sleep the second my head hit the pillow but I went to sleep somewhere at the edge of a forest I think, as soon as my head hit the earth.

When I got up in the morning Auntie Jane was in the kitchen. I took her by surprise when I hugged her, she said my goodness! And she took me by surprise when I saw that she cried a little over the stove.

Sit sit sit, she said and I did did did, twelve years ago I would have loved pancakes, as it is I am a 30-year-old with a weight problem, I am a meaty bird, I ate the edges and left the three fraying moons on my plate, Auntie Jane ate her moons and left the edges.

As I already told you, my ghost talk is metaphorical, mostly, but who hasn't hoped for the odd ghost?

Auntie Jane said she'd take me to all my mother's old haunts, that she'd tell me everything, but at that moment something settled in my head, a familiar pattern of stars, and I felt I already knew.

Where would you like to go first? I'm full of energy, she said, took a sleeping pill last night so I'd be able to keep up with you today, slept like a log, eight hours straight just like the bottle says.

My head did a full 360.

I stared into the back yard, and although I suddenly knew, I still said Who?

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.

from Stopping by Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

look around the rest of the site here… lots to see!

This story won first prize in a contest last year. I have just gone through almost every story I’ve written in the past couple of years, since 2023, I put them all together and it was something like 400 pages so I quickly and brutally went through and did the Marie Condo, there were titles I didn’t even recogize, that might sound strange but some of them I wrote so quickly I can barely remember them, like the way you remember a dream, so I ditched 200 pages and entered the remaining stories in another contest, this one is for unpublished short story collections. I’m working on something big and messy and beautiful at the moment and I can barely stay in bed because I want to get up and work on it, I have a do not get up before 4:30 rule, so instead of new stories I’ll be posting from the collection for a couple of weeks. Here’s Marvins. Hope you like it. Thanks for being here.

Marvins by Sherry Cassells

I took an online writing course which I tried to cancel but it was too late. Our first assignment was to tell one truth and one lie and our fellow writers had to determine which was which. I said I am purple and I am looking forward to this course. They all got it wrong.

Give your characters something to want, create conflict, show don’t tell, write what you know.

Say hello to Marvins, my protagonist who wants for nothing. He is not based on my father or my teacher or a dead uncle or anyone else. His name is because his mother named him three times, once for him, and once for each identical brother who didn’t make it.

Another important thing when writing fiction is plausibility.

Marvins is an old man. His veins are squished blue between skin and bone and he moves like a puppet, from straight to bent with nothing in between. He goes down the stairs in little hops like a stick-man, doesn’t give a hoot about the weather or if he’s out of oatmeal or his pants being too big. He will spend the day on the porch no matter what, his pale eyes adoring the fields, their tinted shapes, the ribbed earth, the tire swing like a target, a carousel of memories.

He might think about the farm when it was bustling, when it was just the two of them, the way the chickens would line up politely waiting to be fed, Helen coaxing the neat green rows into record-breaking yields year after year, the cows scattered in the green like puzzle pieces. And when the children came, the huge pig tearful young Jay bought with his own money to save it from slaughter, the scarecrows Bea and Kay dressed in whatever old clothes they could get their hands on, the fields and fields of lavender that Helen said made her dreams purple and after she said it, his went purple too.

Marvins bought the children like livestock from the family by the creek the other side of town. The man had walked all the way, fifteen miles at least, and he came up to where Marvins was working on the tractor.

I have three babies for sale.

Three?

Triplets. For sale.

Marvins tried to hide the electricity. He looked at Helen who was watching through the kitchen window, a pale plate in her soapy hands like the moon. Marvins pointed to the truck and the man and the road, indicating that he was going to help this story along, and she quite absently nodded.

He remembers now, the silent exchange, the three-headed sack upon which the man had scrawled the names Bea, Jay, and Kay in charcoal, and afterwards, the way the three babies lay one two three beside him in the truck, their mouths open like little birds.

Marvins floated the car along the road and when he placed his hand lightly on the sack it felt as if it contained branches, as if they were stick-babies. In a separate sack, for an extra twenty five cents, rags of diapers, three small bottles, a single spoon.

Marvins clicked his tongue and six blue eyes swooned his way. Each child had a birthmark in the centre of their forehead, as if they’d been torn apart like segments of a grapefruit, and plausibility aside, the ugly red shapes that would fade in time displayed the letters after which each of his children were named: B J and K.

Helen was waiting when Marvins drove up.

Later she would tell Marvins that while he was gone she sat on the front steps wondering if she might be dying young. Her heart beat wildly and she had the sensation it was not far from bursting. She told Marvins that as time went on she felt somehow more than herself – she felt amplified and vivacious – as if she were Helens. She pictured Marvins finding her in the chair on the porch with a purple-edged hole in her chest from where her hearts had finally leapt.

But she saw the car glide up the driveway in the sunlight and she dove from the porch, flew to the car not knowing what was in there, unaware that hers is the character in this story who wanted.

I whispered this recording because it’s so early talking doesn’t feel right, the sun hasn’t come up yet, and this is a whispery sort of story anyway. It’s fiction but there’s a lot of truth to it, the way I used to have to go find my dad and the Quality Street and the basement smell and the kitchen window over the sink where I can picture my mother staring into the dark yard like the apple of her eye was missing. It’s about longings and what ifs. I hope you like it…

Well so much for the whispery recording. I went to listen to it, it wasn’t there so I just re-recorded it, it’s afternoon now and I am not whispering, I decided to record this outside, thought you might hear some birds but there’s a chainsaw instead and a couple of planes, but if you really listen you can hear the chickens.

Have a great weekend everybody and thanks for being here.

The Edge of Nowhere by Sherry Cassells

Wawa, Ontario isn’t even in the middle of nowhere – it’s on the edge – and I’ve still got twenty more miles like a silent movie, the pine forest so seeped it registers black.

My mother said to come before dark and I got maybe fifteen minutes left, the sun’s leaving just a few scraps across the thin road now and as I swing through one familiar curve after another I zone out until suddenly there’s the driveway into which I pull through the darkness. The curtains are still open, my mother’s leaning shape hurries away. She doesn’t want me to know she’s watching for me, still stinging I guess from the teenager I was.

I have come here, in part at least, to show I understand now. Some of it, anyway.

I have just a small bag, almost nothing. I run to the door where my mother feigns surprise which gets in the way of our happiness and our relief. Oh goodness she says I’m so glad you made it and I know that she is still afraid of me, I sense the fear I used to bark so wildly, almost joyfully, against.

My father does not come upstairs and as usual I have to go find him in his burrow, the certain smell although he’s given up both pipe and scotch it’s still there in every cushion, every seam, the dark beams he nailed across the ceiling.

He calls me lass and offers a whiskery kiss and a Quality Street both of which I accept with a smile before I escape to the kitchen, over-chewing the stale toffee like I am yelling, and there she stands, my mother.

I catch her before she knows I’m there.

The real her.

She stares out that black kitchen window above the soapy sink into nothing – and this is what I meant about understanding – because I know that the dark forest is where she’s packed her disappointments, the monumental thisses and thats of her life. The window is where she goes to survive, to make it through, to let herself – once in a while when nobody’s looking or expecting – imagine what if into the black-on-black landscape.

Her body still leans into the window but she turns her head and looks at me, gives me a little nod and I return everything about that look, which she fully sees, she flickers an acknowledgment, but still there is a care she takes when she asks what’s new? like she pours it, and this time I tell her.

We sit at the kitchen table and I tell her about work and neighbours and friends, my struggles with eating healthy I whisper through the warm residue of toffee, my money problems and then right away I show her on my phone the new boots I bought online, and I show her Andy with whom I have had two dates, he looks nice she says, and I touch gently – and this one is only ever between mothers and daughters – on my hovering-but-improving self-esteem and she whispers back practically choking on love good for you.

But I don’t tell her about the disappointments I packed into the forest those last twenty miles, the ones I will eventually search for through my own kitchen window.

Short stories are the love of my life but every once in a while I get tempted by something bigger, usually happens this restless time of year, I got an idea like a rocket a couple of days ago and haven’t thought of much else since, it’s a zoo around here and my work is piling up but all I do is stare off into the distance thinking about how I’m going to bring it to (larger than) life which involves, for starters, taking next week off work to get the ball rolling.

Still though, love writing these short stories.

Thanks for being here.

Martin Street by Sherry Cassells

When the men finished paving our new street, drunk on my father’s whiskey, they told him he could name it if he liked, somebody’s uncle was on the city planning committee. I was a kid, I stood on the quilt of grass that would soon be our front lawn. My father, also drunk, thought about it for only a few seconds before he said we’ll name it after my first-born and I turned to him the way it feels when a cake comes your way in a restaurant and everybody starts singing Happy Birthday, I mean you feel everything from shame to pride, and I thought Davey Road would be just fine but he said Martin instead and that’s how I found out I had a brother.

Thus began my search for Martin Street, isn’t that the funniest thing, turned out his name was Martin William Street and he went to the catholic school on the other side of the path from ours. It was a brand new school, they’d built it over the summer, and they worked out some kind of a deal I guess, they got our playground, and we got a new one, which sounds great, but the new one wasn’t nearly as good as the old one – this is just the kind of thing that keeps people and countries at war. It is true that their slide was old and dinted, the paint chipped revealing like the rings of a tree how many Septembers it had seen, but it had a far more perilous pitch, it reeked of rust and fear, and the swings went way higher than ours, our new ones, and they squealed like applause, and when you jumped off, if you landed on the black path that separates the two schools, you were golden.

Our new playground was at the other side of the school but we, the grade eights, we didn’t use it, just the little kids did, we kept watch over our old playground and scowled. None of those kids could do half of what we did, they were all in uniforms for one thing.

We were learning in english about how important conflict is in stories and there was a sort of pleasure I got from our little feud, conflict is great when you’re on the right side.

There was only one kid who gave it a go, he just sort of went mental, down the slide with as much gusto as any of us, and from the swing he landed not on the black path but beyond it, somebody said he was probably in grade nine or 10, their school went all the way to grade 13, ours stopped dead at the end of grade eight.

One of their teachers, they’re priests I guess, and one looked like Professor Snape, he rang his bell like crazy and hollered to this kid, he yelled Martin Street you stop that right now! but the kid was feral at that point so Snape went over and grabbed him by the collar and hauled him inside.

Somebody behind me said who is that kid? and I said that’s my brother.

It was an assumption and it came to bite me in the ass.

Let me digress.

I couldn’t get anything more out of my suddenly mute father that day so I ran to our old house, we were four blocks away, and I said to my mother, why didn’t you tell me about Martin?

She squinted at me from behind the sewing machine where she was making drapes for the new place, she said, who on earth is Martin?

I know it’s so common now but back then hardly anybody’s parents broke up, but mine did, my father left that very night and my mother swore me to secrecy, not only about their breaking up, I was to say he was away on business, but about the existence of a brother, the enigma who had enough force to break up my parents.

Talk about conflict.

Anyway, we all know there’s no getting the cat back in the bag, and not one but three of those kids who heard my claim must have mentioned it over their dinner table. Our phone rang three times during dinner, we didn’t answer as per policy, my mother and I had an ongoing game we played, she said tell me something I don’t know and I would, I’d tell her about conflict for instance and how it is necessary for the progression of a good story, and sometimes I asked her, tell me something I don’t know, and she would answer something like, the bobbin in a sewing machine holds exactly half a spool of thread.

The most interesting answer won and I don’t remember her ever winning. Most of the stuff she said was unremarkable, yet I remember all of it.

My father had seldom been home for dinner, we didn’t play our game when he was, I wonder now if his competitive side would have tempted him to spill another juicy secret or two at our invitation to tell me something I don’t know.

Like I said three kids blurted out that I had a brother, my mother finally answered the three phone calls, and the funny thing was she didn’t get mad at me even a little.

It wasn’t right of me to ask you to keep it a secret, she said, it’s just that Martin Street has no idea he’s your father’s son.

She proceeded to tell me the facts of life, she was too late of course. I mean no shit, Sherlock, I’m in grade eight.

My mother said that everybody would know, and if I had to get into a fight about it to go ahead, so my dukes were partially up the next day when we were watching over our playground again. This time Martin took some interest in us, he didn’t mess around on the slide but he sat on the swing facing us, he swung slightly sideways, both feet firmly on the ground, daring one of us to say something.

Finally he spoke.

Which of you is Davey McGillicuddy?

I was a scrapper ready to scrap, I broke from the crowd and hollered, ME!

Marty was a scrapper, too, you could see it in the way he moved, he was bigger than I thought, I heard Snape calling him, his voice torqued into a weird sort of soprano, but Marty ignored it, he walked over to me and this is how the world should be, I'm not saying conflict is unnecessary but I also don’t think it's the fucking heart of any story, really, the heart of the story is when the two sides put their dukes down and have a hug in the middle of the school yard, in front of everybody, talk about how it feels when a cake comes your way.

The longer a piece gets, the more lies you have to remember. I mean you can’t talk about the milky moonlight, which I do, on a snowy night, which I also do.

I gotta tell you I am loving this newest Next Door, writing it I mean, I can’t stop. Can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning. What a summer! Hope you are enjoying it, too, the summer and the story.

Thanks for being here!

Link to Part 1

Link to Part 2

The Widow Next Door – Part 3 by Sherry Cassells

Hex always said she could never get a good breath but it got serious last year, she started passing out. Why can’t I breathe? she asked and I shrugged, I only shrugged, she was too fragile for me to tell her the truth. She couldn’t breathe because she was stuffed with horror.

There’s something about bad mother stories, everybody turned to us dying for one, hungry for a dollop of that particular madness, but a dollop’s about all they can take, they liked the one about the frying pan and how she heated it first, another favourite was the one about the spidery basement, but there was a limit to what they accepted, their sense of decency swooped in and they convinced themselves we’d said ache not pain, them not us, anything but burn – but there were some who heard what we said – monster not mother. They did nothing to stop it but they stuffed rolled up money in our dirty little pockets or apples into our grubby little fists.

We were beggar children who sold horror for money and nourishment.

We warmed up with the smaller stuff, the expired meat, cut-off utilities, the religious rantings, some shit-talk about how she boiled everything to death and never changed the sheets, how she threatened us under her breath, and told us to fackoff like a crow.

There was nothing physically wrong with Hex but a heart murmur they were casual about, they believed her respiratory malfunction to be stress-related and she was referred to a shrink. I went with her to the first appointment. I wanted to hear the guy say the privacy oath which she did, Dr. Theo Rice was a woman, but she couldn’t take it, she resigned the case after the second meeting and that’s when Dr. L. Starling practically apparitioned, such a strange cat he looked like a lime, he was German from Oklahoma, his accent was unbearable but he was the real deal, he saw not through us but into us, I couldn’t believe how small his mouth got when he talked, Hex said it’s like he’s talking through his arsehole, but in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, she liked him and so did I.

When he lifted his purple glasses and assured me his devotion to his creed, he held up one crooked nicotine-stained finger to his green lips and uttered a bubbly shhhh, and then he said particularly puckery and straight into me – listen Trench, you might need some therapy too – I noticed he had one eye brown the other blue.

I like a shrink with faults.

He's a lawyer, too, his name is Larabee Berlin Starling – but we call him Lime.

I told him how we got rich. The truth I mean. I’ve made up some great lies about it, ask me sometime, but he's the only one who knows the truth. He screwed up his mouth and hollered you’re kidding! he issued a bubbly little collapsing sound, he never just laughed but seemed to cry, too, his mouth a constrictor knot.

My neighbours came over three days after our bourbon debut and invited me to dinner, they stood a little shaky at my door, fidgeting and impatient they waited for me like children. I took a jar from the fridge so full it looked empty, they must have wondered why I tucked a jar of cold air inside my coat. We walked single-file between our houses, the forest was denser than it looked – just like most people – but I was hoping the widows, note the pluralization, would be an exception.

The jar was full of moonshine.

Did I mention our father was a moonshiner?

T H E F I R S T R O U N D
Charlotte screwed up her face and said it taste like sin, neighbour, breathless Stella agreed heartily, everything tastes like iron to me, which is definitely in sin’s ballpark.

Their house was the same as mine but if the blueprints were stacked one over the other some lines would be off, a few walls were longer or shorter, one stair greater here and lesser there, some angles more generous other stingy, and as a result it seemed to me slightly off kilter, there was an Alice in Wonderland feel to it, and whatever two acres of forested distance lends or takes from the sun, it shone differently in this house, the sky came through their eroded windows more threateningly than it did through mine. I wished I’d worn my boots.

T H E S E C O N D R O U N D
What is the silt? Stella noticed the thin line of grey that appeared in the liquid as it poured, like an effervescent chain, the tiny bubbles hung in the glass like a galaxy. I said the distillation was imperfect but safe, I’d had it many times before, it was from my old balcony still in the city, I promised the clarity of future moonshine, I told them I had a brand new still in my forest, they said it’s not my forest, I begged to differ but didn’t.

They drank with gusto.

Their living room was sunken, mine was not, there was no need for furniture as there was a cushiony ledge all around yet the sisters had the place stuffed, two of everything, two unnecessary couches, too many chairs, I went to the fridge with difficulty at first it was like trespassing between houses I could not find an opening, in the kitchen there were two fridges, I kept pulling open the wrong fridge, if Hex were there I would have thought she were tricking me.

R O U N D T H R E E
Jesus this stuff is like quicksand!

They gave me a tour, the bedrooms upstairs a replica of mine but for the pale paint, like faded flowers, mine were white white white, their bathrooms were decaying but decorated, mine were solid and barren and cold, their kitchen floor was ancient linoleum with pathways that provided a topographical map of their do-si-do triangle from fridges to sink to stoves. The joint was in general disrepair, on the cusp of becoming a fixer-upper, Stella admitted she was still paying the mortgage on the house next door.

F O U R
It’s snowing. Let’s go for a walk.

But it didn’t end up a walk so much as a climb, from balcony to balcony they showed me the way the milky moonlight leaned into each one, and the way those at the back gave different views of the forest and the lake beyond it, we each had a lantern, we called one another Jeckel, Hyde, Jack the Ripper, Sherlock, Charlotte said last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again, the speckle of my house through the snowy lace of forest gave me, well, it gave me a dollop of pleasure.

F I V E
I have an offer. You can make quite a lot of money if you are interested. It will be shocking at first no doubt but given your history –

I can't remember if they said what history!?!?!? or simply swallowed it along with their quicksand.

S I X
Stella cockeyed her sister and said I think we can manage that don’t you sweetheart? or maybe it was Charlotte.

S E V E N
*
(that is not a portrait of Lime's arse but an indication of my utter forgetfullness)

I woke up with wet feet on a rug of sheepskin upon my living room floor, everything around me was white, I wondered if the windows were air or snow, I got to my knees and shuffled over to see the sisters placing white laundry into white snow, and if we can dip inside their heads for a moment I believe they were thinking how lucky they were to have a neighbour like me, a rich man willing to write them into his will to the tune of a million dollars apiece, and all they had to do was kill me.

We met three days later at the offices of Drum, Starling & Croxon, Lime had revised my will and listed the conditions of our upcoming enterprise, the sisters were early, when I walked into the fluorescent office they looked quite citric themselves, one was lemon the other orange they sat across from Lime with his whistle-tight lips.

Jesus Christ he said when he saw me – I knew I looked awful I’d been over at Hex’s the night before for a drunken séance – you look like you’ve seen a ghost.

I have solved my m problem by stacking the keyboard from my desktop computer on top of the laptop one, all makeshit (some typos are meant to be) solutions such as this have problems of their own, but I can’t stop writing this story long enough to address the real problem, and dealing with the after effects of halfarsedness is nothing new to me, just ask my accountant, the top keyboard keeps depressing the illumination key on the bottom one which is adding to the spookiness of this story.

This was only going to be part two of The Widow Next Door but I am really getting into it here and I’m already on part four so I thought I’d combine part two and three into one and give you this as a weekend present, or curse.

I don’t do outlines, outlines are for sissies, I go in totally half-ready, so I can’t wait to see what happens next either.

Thanks for being here.

If you want to read part one first, here it is.

The Widow Next Door – Part 2 by Sherry Cassells

That bourbon-tinged night I had a David Lynch fever dream, a dream of glorious, uncomfortable, mesmerizing madness. It was one of the most credible dreams I’ve ever had and I woke up in a state of savage confidence that it was not a dream at all.

If I thought of the other me – the one that had brushed his teeth and gone to bed in proper pyjamas the night before – I thought of him with indifference. I was willing to let him be the one to diffuse into nothing with the dawn, the Victorian gentlemen would slither away, back into his Victorian novels, perhaps as the doctor attending Mrs. Rochester on the top floor of heaven, he would burn off like the dew and fog, gone by noon but for an outline that would perforate when jarred, and eventually flee. Throughout my new life he would at intervals be evoked, over coffee or sunset, the new me would remember, wistfully or not, the me that I was in a brief ripple of deja vu.

But of course I came out of it, and it is instead this dissipating stranger who ruffles my feathers and breathes down my neck, the pulseless figment hangs desperately on, by the time I am walking down the stairs to put on the coffee he is a pain in my ass, thankfully I can work from home, imagine going into the office with this shadowy dream over my head, still aching from the night before.

The night before.

Stella like a dazed actress trying out her lines. I used to live here. She said it once twice three times before I asked, finally, when on earth did you live here? but it was Charlotte who spoke up, she said Stella moved out in the summer.

This summer?

I said it incredulously, as one would say this ghost? or in the examining room this lump?

It is untechnically winter at the moment, the clocks fell backward last week – strange that in our automated world where time changes itself we still practice these ancient customs – this morning there is a careful lacing of frost over the windows, yesterday's rain has been preempted for snow, a Pearl Jam song squeezes through my head and into the thin November air.

I was trying to sell my house, Charlotte said, but when my sister told me her circumstances were about to change I suggested she move in with me, you’ll sooner or later find out how big these houses are, they are endless, too much for one person.

So it was premeditated.

I wondered if I could ask the murdering sisters a favour in return for my silence.

 But first I must tell you who I want dead and why.

Remember back to the penthouse that started it all, I was my sister's lunch guest, she is 2025’s version of Mrs. Rochester – I pulled the old poisoned chalice switcheroo when she went to the kitchen for the salt I requested – she is one ceiling away from heaven she says, but I trust that 2025’s hell hath the appropriate fury.

 INTERMISSION

When you grow up on a farm words like kill and slaughter are simply verbs of intention, average words in farm vocabulary, necessary and non-evocative. We learned young me and Hex that our lives were going to be full of this language, and we developed a playfulness about death which we incorporated into our lives.

We took enormous risks because death was everywhere, we were seeped in it, running with scissors was nothing compared to the fuckery we ran with. I suppose we challenged death to cope with its constant presence. We roared at death. Our Irish mother served us blood pudding and red eggs for breakfast, red eggs were the ones unsuitable for baking, she cracked all the eggs we gathered into a glass before throwing them either into cake batter or pan. Have you seen Dexter? We got twisted like that early on. There’s the smell of iron stuck in my nose or maybe elsewhere in my head I can never shake the taste or the smell of slaughter. We used death as a comedic crutch, I mean how many siblings do you know who stick their knuckles between each other’s ribs and say you’re nearly ready for the kill and what about the pokes we gave one another indicating our nicely marbled loins, we were always calculating, when Hex turned to look out a window I’d hold an invisible knife to her neck you’re dead I’d say and swipe. We had a rule about nighttime, no hunting in the dark, but Hex was an early riser and some mornings I was dead before I even woke up.

We played truth dare double dare promise or repeat endlessly, we always chose double dare, in the school playground we were the entertainment, our audience were pig-tailed and knock-kneed children doing The Scream as we exhibited our superiority over death, that’s why we climbed birds cliff with such abandon, fearlessly, death wasn’t a possibility for us but a certainty so fuck it we said.

Who knew we’d make it this far?

In the doorway of our shared bedroom where normal families drew lines indicating new heights, we wrote the names of the recently slayed, they did not have names when living but when dead we granted them identities in trends, from the cast of Gilligan’s Island, to every Muppet we could think of, The Beverley Hillbillies, Granny was the oldest laying hen, one of the few souls who had her name all along, a privilege earned by the few, including horses and our dogs, allowed to achieve natural deaths.

Hex kissed me when I left her penthouse apartment and whispered into my ear you’re dead. It was in the salt, you idiot.

You might want to take a parachute next time you go onto your balcony, I whispered back.

Last year Hex had a health scare and the salt and balcony whispers are the first indication the game’s back on, when I drove through the gates I looked up, she was sitting side-saddle on the balcony. Little shit.

So after all that gore – I used the word death only eight times in this, wait, that makes it nine but it feels like more – do you think Hex is the one I want dead? Of course not. Perhaps you think I will threaten the sisters next door into the serial killer genre to simply give Hex a close call, a real close call, one that will make her finally say you win, brother, you win.

Or – and give this some thought for I do not tell any of this story lightly – do you think it's possible that I might ask them to kill me?

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.