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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fields Next Door by Sherry Cassells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But no.

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

I N T E R L U D E

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

– h a n g i n t h e r e –

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

– o n e m o r e t h i n g –

This has happened before.

R E S U M E

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

In the morning, my sister was gone.

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

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

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