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.