Not sure if any of you ever go, but there’s a whole website attached to this story, you can click on my name up top if you want to look around. Close to the bottom there’s a section with links to some of my favourite short stories. I change them up once in a while because I have a lot of favourite short stories, and as soon as I get permission from T. Coraghessan Boyle, author of Chicxulub, I am going to swap it in. It’s a story I read in the New Yorker maybe 30 years ago and it’s stuck with me like the real Chicxulub stuck with Clayton Handsome Chayn.

Got a little fancy with the audio on this one, a number of things happened yesterday afternoon all at once, I was telling someone about my son’s handle when he DJs which is Turn!Turn!Turn! and I was just finishing off Chapter 4, right at the kitchen part, so that’s the song I put on the radio, why not, and I felt like listening to it so I did, and I noticed those lyrics and how they fit right into the story so I plunked them in at the end.

Here’s Chapter 4 if you’re following along and if you’re not, you can start from scratch here.

Thanks for being here.

I don’t know why in Canada's true north when we should have been learning about our home and native land, we studied everything but – The Balkan States, New Zealand, Japan, The Soviet Union – and in grade eight it was Latin America. I chose the Yucatán Peninsula for my presentation, I liked all the chewy syllables, and when I stood in front of the class it was its underbelly I talked about, the impact crater called Chicxulub, formed when a six mile wide asteroid hit southeastern Mexico 66 million years ago.

Think about that I demanded of my classmates and then slowly like air from a balloon I hissed six miles wide sixty six million years ago and my first stint at public speaking spiraled like the spent balloon, into constellations and galaxies and black holes. I roared, I spewed, I soared, the teacher gave me a D-minus, she said I didn’t even mention the Yucatán Peninsula once.

I carried that asteroid around in my head, always wondering whether any hurtling debris had made it through the atmosphere, and by the time I got to high school the shooting stars in question had come to rest as twinkling interior meteorites.

Plugging through the fields that day to get my shovel, Mrs. Field frozen at her clothesline as if she were hung there herself, again I thought of Chicxulub. How joined are the events of our lives to the earth and the heavens? I was convinced that  beneath my field churned a miniature Chicxulub that housed a solar system of jewels, the former playthings of angel-children.

My shovel revealed many stones of no colour and little hue, I held them to the sky they only slightly altered the blue, some leaned bluer, some less so, a few gave a beautiful algaeic tint, one or two pinked like the air around my grandfather’s roses. I poured them into my shirt pocket, astounded when one of them slid straight through the fabric, I pressed my hand, both hands, firmly against my pocket and ran through the mud, squelching, this time to the barn where I placed them into a steel bucket of water and like the Alka-Seltzer® my grandmother used to let me plunk into her tea, I waited for the fizz to dissipate and then slowly scooped from the water to my lap the oddest of entities, some were like pale raisins, some soft pyramids, others thorns and teeth.

Suddenly Mrs. Field was behind me, she whispered diamonds, my love over my shoulder. She later told me she rushed over because she thought I was having a heart attack the way I ran amok through the fields clutching my chest.

I was living alone at the time, my grandparents had moved to South America for its extended growing season and superior wool, but one never lives alone on a farm, for the animals were my tribe, my ilk – two pigs, two ewes, two goats, two cows, two llamas, two chickens too many – you could call me Noah but for a single farting bull, who I called Frap, all of us animals adopted a toothy indignant grin whenever he blurted his own name.

Diamonds, my love.

The words on either side of my were as unexpected as what happened next, Mrs. Field took full and utter advantage of me right there in the barn, in front of my blushing tribe.

Our courtship was brief, by the time we left the barn in the morning we were already betrothed, when I said after you, Mrs. Field, she whispered, call me Daisy. I looked back at the animals, all heads were high, all eyes sparked at mine, Frap frapped, we all tooth grinned and chortled, Mrs. Field, I mean Daisy, included.

I had forgotten all about the diamonds, or whatever they were, until I saw them once again sparkling in the field, the field that could grow nothing, no stalk nor weed, yet allowed these marvelous stones to reach the light of day all of a sudden, but then it occurred to me also all of a sudden, that perhaps my grandparents had been privy to the field’s secrets, I mean how rich can you get selling roses to a loyal but small community. They’d sent me pictures of their new home in Montevideo, both of them strong, their skin rich from sunlight, they each wore a white knitted scarf which in the strong salty breeze shot straight out from their golden necks, their white hair also sideways, and the entire field of tall grasses leaned. All of these things pointed to their gigantic gemhouse which reflected sharply the South Atlantic Ocean, a moat of blood around it – my grandfather’s roses.

But back to my sister Daisy Chayn, we were in the kitchen, my happy wife made us blood pudding and eggs in our small kitchen, she butchered and cooked and gathered the eggs I could not, she turn turn turned with the Byrds on the radio. I’d had the picture of my grandparents enlarged and it hung on the wall beside where we ate. My sister Daisy rather drank her food due to the overwhelming braces, I was surprised she could hold up her head at all, the radio was coming in loud and clear thanks to her, and she looked at the picture. She pointed to what I thought was a flaw in the print, I must say it was so similar to the introductory flash I saw in my field I did wonder at first if my grandfather had tried a new sort of farming, my sister Daisy laughed, she chortled, she said look how my braces caught the sunlight you can barely see me!

And then I noticed the chain of pale raisins around her golden neck.

A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together

If you want to listen to that song a million times like I did, here it is.