Hot here this week, and hazy, waiting for the daisies to bloom. I’ve been busy putting a collection of short stories together, somebody said I should stop writing for a while and spend the time getting something ready to send to a publisher. I’ve done this before but not in a whole-hearted way. I am trying to follow poet Dionne Brand’s advice, she says “You have to write until it shines. Until it’s so brilliant that no agent, no publisher, no reader ever wants to put it down.” So far I’m at 39 stories, 138 pages, close to 50,000 words. It’s going great but I have some muscles that need movement so I decided to try a story and here’s what happened.

Myles In Two Parts by Sherry Cassells

I don’t know when I first thought there was something wrong with Myles.

 We had a Molly’s Cookie Factory and sometimes my dad popped his head in our room and gave us that look, Myles would shotgun on the way there in order to arrive first. We stayed in the car and watched our father go to the broken cookie window which was a disappointment but barely. He didn't go to the ordinary window unless we were having company or my mother was mad at him and he used them as bait.

 They were still wonderful, just not as wonderful as they could have been.

 We didn’t eat any in the car, the smell was almost enough, I always shotgunned home and rolled up the window to keep the smell in, Myles sat in the back with the bulging butter-stained brown paper bag.

 Once in a while there was a whole cookie and it was like it was your birthday.

My father stopped at the liquor store, this time the disappointment was real, he met Mr. Barker a few cars down, they were golf friends and I could tell my dad was trying to get away but Mr. Barker was relentless. Eventually I went to help him but I got snagged, too. I hoped Myles wouldn’t try the same sort of rescue. I had the feeling Mr. Barker would eat us. There was something wrong with him. It seemed like he had no control over his mouth, his face went surprised at some of the things his mouth said and his body language was like he was learning to dance, no rhythm, eyebrows high, pinked cheeks. My father later said Mr. Barker was drunk.

 When we got back into the car the bag was still on Myles’ lap and he looked arrow straight ahead, a statue, this was not the time I thought there was something wrong with him, and maybe the word wrong is wrong word anyway, maybe the something wrong with him was not actually wrong – just different.

 Myles couldn’t understand math, or maybe he just wouldn’t. He only cared about being honest with words.

 We were all young and vacant, just sort of learning things I suppose, we were on intake mode and passive about it, we didn’t think critically or maybe we didn’t think at all, things just sort of sifted into our lives, we learned without learning about things they now consider toxic. But Myles didn’t learn those things. It was as if he had an extra valve that prevented nonsense from getting through, I say this as if it were an automatic thing but it wasn’t, he had the capacity to think about things and he actively rejected some of them, most of them.

Time the cookies were different. Gross, but different. Myles had put them together. He softened the edges with spit and matched the pieces up perfectly while we were trying to get away from Mr. Barker. They were not soggy or anything, scarred but whole, I didn’t even mind the spit, our father laughed and asked Myles, who was famous for naming things, what he called them.

 Broken Dreams, he said. That’s what I mean about the words.

 I didn’t know there’d be a part two to this story until now. I left the house this morning after what is now part one and drove to the Gull River to paddleboard. Lake Ontario is just down the road but sometimes you need a river and a long drive, there were purple flowers in fields, blurred by driving they looked like purple lakes in the middle of the green, like some sort of beautiful eclipse. The story stayed buoyant all day, only when I thought about it did it gain weight so I tried not to, I let it accumulate what it would.

 My father was a cab driver. His was the only cab in town and my mother was the dispatcher. They rented a little upstairs spot downtown. Some of the most remarkable possessions I have today are things my parents traded people in exchange for rides home, mostly Indigenous men and women who had come to town and spent all their money.

 I have a fortune in beaded moccasins, silver, turquoise, shame.

 There was something wrong with Myles. After high school, my father took him shotgun in the taxi all the time.

 Myles, who didn’t understand numbers, turned out to be a human odometer. His trip calculations were 100% accurate, sometimes at dinner my dad would ask him the grand total and at first I’d run out to verify but like most miracles once you expect them they get absorbed into the territory of normal.

 Do you believe that somebody fell in love with him?

 It was Cheryl Manning whose mother was Molly from the cookie factory, she was a little off like Myles but in a different direction, her something wrong also had to do with honesty, the first time she came over for dinner it was a surprise, none of us knew they were even dating, she was so unshy it was shocking, absurd, she asked my parents questions in a grilling way, she was always after the truth in the same way Myles was.

 Myles ended up working at the cookie factory, he implemented many changes including new flavours and shapes but the most important thing he did was figure out why cookies got broken, turned out it was Mrs. Beasley our kindergarten teacher whose nerves were frazzled, he moved her to the marshmallow department and after that, cookies were so seldom broken they closed the broken cookie window.

 Cheryl asked him why he thought that was an improvement, didn’t he know some people needed the broken cookie window, so he started producing what turned out to be the best cookies of all, purposefully broken cookies mended together with icing.

 Broken Dreams were only available at the broken cookie window.