Hope you don’t mind that I am experimenting on you but I am. Backstory can be a drag, it’s necessary but it can hamper the swing of a story. I’ve written pieces where I list everything you need to know point form at the beginning, like you can get away with doing in a play, you just say what’s what, but I’m trying it a different way here. All of the Next Door series are experimental, and none of them are perfect. Pretty sure you haven’t read anything like them before. I haven’t. These chapters take on a shape of their own, I just come to my keyboard these early mornings and start in a mad hatter sort of way, usually while I look out the window.

Enjoy your day. You can hear the early birds in the recording…

THE FIELDS NEXT DOOR by Sherry Cassells

CHAPTER 3

Some days you can unravel forever. Wait. My wooly grandmother used to joke about unravelling as in going crazy. I’ll try that again. You can unravel some days forever.

Once in a while I have a dream in which an entire lifetime is lived overnight like gulping down a whole-life novel. Maybe you’ve had dreams like this, too, I don’t know if they are for everyone. The me in these dreams is only slightly the me that I am, and I remain this other me upon waking, until I am absorbed, and I don’t mind saying sometimes reluctantly, back into my own skin.

That’s what the day in the field was like, and when I remember it, I am not sure I was on that day the me that I am when I am me.

Still with me?

That day was full, endless, page after never-ending page. 

I hope the distant souls in the permanent folds of dementia are quietly unravelling days and nights such as these.

One of Mrs. Field’s sons lived in town and that very morning he had delivered to his mother her mail, and there was an imposter in the mix, a letter addressed to me, and she learned my last name was not that of my grandparents but that of my mother, her maiden name Chayn, a variant of the Irish surname MacSeain, meaning "son of John".

Come with me while I digress a moment, let’s talk about falling in love, a term which indicates a certain trajectory that I have trouble with.

I cannot distinguish between varieties of love, its many splendours are but one to me, there is no difference the love I feel for breakfast when I am hungry, a breeze when hot, happiness on a forlorn day, my dog Blue, a well-structured bloom. And so when Daisy, Mrs. Field’s name was Daisy, when she told me she had fallen in love with me that day, I felt a variety of misgivings, perhaps I had piqued her curiosity but how on earth her heart?

For years I wondered what made her fall in love with me, what took her so long and yet why so suddenly. My circumstances were not yet influenced by the absence or the presence of giant gemstones, and I did not arrive at the solution until she was my wife of several months.

(The gemstones are rolling around in my mouth but in the name of good storytelling I must keep them out of your reach a little longer.)

I was passing through the kitchen when her same son Simon came with the mail, our mail, and for the first time she saw her new name in the little glass window. Mrs. Daisy Chayn. Never had I seen her more delighted. I stood a moment speculating upon the name of her first husband – and if you’ll allow a sloppy homonym his name was Barry Field, and he was – but that matter aside you can see why she married him once you know why she married me. 

I finally understood the nature of her love for me as it began, and since it had grown into something quite else by that time, I hooted at the revelation, unable for the moment to tell her what was so funny. Our love, very different from the love I have for everything else, began with the possibility of a most lyrical name. Mrs. Daisy Chayne.

Jesus Christ that was a long story, or maybe I just told it long, but the real story in this chapter is the discovery of another homonym, sorry I know you were gunning for the gemstones.

I had not seen my parents since I moved from their house to the farm when I started high school, I knew nothing of their lives, they wanted nothing to do with we three oddballs, but there came a day the summer after Daisy and I married – these backstories are killing the momentum – but I must tell you we lived in Daisy’s house so The Fields Next Door were my own fields, I wasn’t sure how I would manage the left tilt, but the transition was natural as could be.

There was a knock on the door, my eyes darted left, I opened the backwards door – here we go again but you see everything was backwards in Daisy’s house due to the overwhelming lefthandedness of its previous occupants – I opened the door to the left and there stood a wide-eyed girl, she was wearing a seersucker dress, disheveled, like when the vertical hold is making wild patterns on the tv, there were heavy-duty braces on her teeth and she sprayed words at me, none of which I could properly hear, she was crying at the same time, she looked rather mechanical.

I’d been watching television, or trying to, the reception was always shit, and when I invited the poor thing inside and directed her wobbly to the couch, the picture steadied immediately – she was an antennae – I saw for the first time Elly May Clampett clearly, oh my, it pained me when my wife came in and snapped it off.

This strange girl cleared her strange throat and wiped her strange nose on her seersucker shoulder. She then revealed herself in a series of mad hiccups to be my sister, Daisy Chayn, and if that’s not the homonym of the century, I’m not Clayton Handsome Chayn.