the antidote to everything

Good morning. It’s Monday smak i the middle of september, beautiful here, I have a buggered shoulder right now due to competitive yoga, just kidding but hmmmm, there’s def a grain of truth, a grind of truth, that’s what I did to my shoulder, my daughter informed me that we should all be able to do eleven pushups, who the fuck comes up with these numbers, and I took on the challenge without asking my left shoulder’s permission, or perhaps without proper chatarangua form, and it went pythaaannnng, and so I can;t swim I just stand there and occasionall fall onto my back and squirm a bit, but these mid september days and Lake Ontario are divine.

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, my brother Harvey 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.

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

Auntie Cupid by Sherry Cassells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lake Superior is an autological lake.

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

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

WALLFLOWER by Sherry Cassells

She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fragile Ones

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

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

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

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

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

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

They said her heart was fragile.

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

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

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

Uncle Frederick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Silent Era

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

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

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

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

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

This was the second most important event of my life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zero Gravity

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

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

I have butterflies.

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

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

WALLFLOWER by Sherry Cassells

She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fragile Ones

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

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

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

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

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

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

They said her heart was fragile.

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

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

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

Uncle Frederick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Silent Era

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

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

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

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

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

This was the second most important event of my life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zero Gravity

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

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

I have butterflies.

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

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

What is Love by Sherry Cassells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is a happy ending.

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

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

Our Mutual Bones by Sherry Cassells

EVERYTHING WE DON’T SAY

I hate these goodbyes.

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

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

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

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

The sky looks trampled; tomorrow there will be snow.

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

She knows it is difficult for me to leave.  

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

This is where I grew up and everything means something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you gonna finish that?

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

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

I’ll know it when I see it.

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

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

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

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

This is my language. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I tried to make him a bird. 

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

Still with me?

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

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

I know what I do by doing nothing.

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

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

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

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

In the morning he was gone.

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

What would I have said to him anyway?

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

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

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

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

THE LOST WEEKEND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I haven’t had a nightmare since.

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

THE COUNTING OF SHEEP

We keep driving, our silent heads on swivel.

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

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

That’s a great story..

Was your mother good to you?

Seven times the first year.

Another ship noses into the snow-globe.

His turn: What other preventative art did you make?

I didn’t know where you were.

A net. At the cliff.

She was mean as a badger.

Is she dead?

A net?

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

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

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

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

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

My gaping compartments sometimes crave a good nightmare.

WE HYPOTHETICAL CATS

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

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

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

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

Okay Schrödinger, he says.

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

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

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

Everything and nothing, he says.

The second cat lands.

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

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

I don’t.

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

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

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

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

Can I ask about yours?

He adjusts his wings.

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

THE WORLD’S GREATEST VAGABOND

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

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

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

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

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

Tommy says what’s that?

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

Jesus, he said.

They’re ladders, I squint.

Of course they are.

My turn: Where will you go next?

Uruguay in January.

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

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

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

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

EVERYTHING WE SHORE

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

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

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

Enough until spring?

I think so.

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

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

I will do Glory, I say.

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

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

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

AN IMPROPER ENDING

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

Ujjayi breath. Lion’s breath. Roar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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