ROCKPAPERSCISSORS

I wrote this one in Thunder Bay, unusually slowly, started on the plane on the way there and finished on the way home. Longhand. That’s the paper part. The Sleeping Giant is the rock part. The story is the scissors.

It’s funny but I thought it was way longer than it is, feels like maybe the middle dropped out, I hope it works as a story.

Thanks for being here.

RockPaperScissors by Sherry Cassells

I thought of the road again last night like falling into a crease in my mind, I try to scramble from these sorts of things but I rarely can, the gravity is too much, I try to think of something else, counting backwards sometimes works or going through The Lord’s Prayer in my head, but last night it came to me like a movie, and there I was a kid again walking home from school beneath a grey sky, the fall fields on one side and the cooling lake through the forest the other.

The first thing I saw in the distance was a toppled kitchen chair, I didn’t recognize it but the next one was perfectly upright and it was ours, then came other shapes that upon approach proved to be our furniture, the kitchen table was flat across the road its legs splayed like a struck animal and smaller things, some cutlery, spools of thread, a pillow, a blue blouse blown into the forest, I stepped over my father’s belt, instead of going home I turned into Maggie White’s driveway, she was our nearest neighbour, she came to the door, what are you doing here Davy Mac? I didn’t answer, I just pointed to the road, you could see the end of our brown couch, and something white in the forest like snow, my bedspread.

Maggie was a widow, her husband and son had been drowned, she took my hand and together we walked down the road discovering as we went things like a curtain rod, broken plates, my math textbook I had forgotten that morning, a stretch of buttons, my father’s fishing tackle all messed up and linked together. I don’t know what I expected to find but I did not expect to find nothing, the house was empty, my parents were gone, nothing official happened, the bank took the farm and Maggie took me. 

After discovering nothing we went back along the road, I gathered from the forest my mother’s blue blouse, I took spools of thread, my father’s twisted tackle, a pair of red socks, his belt, Maggie took all my mother's unfinished embroideries, the ones depicting in exxes the local scenery, she finished each one, she did the boring bits my mother didn't bother with, the grey skies, the fields, the lake through the forest along the road I cannot forget.

If somebody made a movie of my childhood Part One it would be not silent but quiet, just the whir of a sewing machine, a tractor crisscrossing the window like a slow-motion fly, and in the winter just the whir and the wind,  everything white but for tangles of black thread walnut trees, silver birch zippered along the ridge, seams of rock between fields, sequins from the lake, each season held a different sort of tension, my parents did not speak but in bursts of anger.

When I moved in with Maggie and began Part Two of my childhood, I learned a new sort of abnormality, that of adjustment, the geography was different, we were closer to the lake, it felt too close at times, the fields were behind the house and blurred into one, tufts of stubborn corn still rose here and there, two scarecrows spun like torture.

I slept in Maggie’s son’s bed, on the diagonal, I did not want to fall into his crease.

The room was not a museum nor was it not not a museum. She had turned it into a sewing room but I knew the chaos of such a room and could tell this was never used as such, there were comic books on the bedside table, three rocks and a jellybean, a sewing machine you had to pump was on the desk, a displaced math textbook lay open on the floor.

I didn’t until those days know the consequences of trying not to dream and so that’s what I did, I tried not to dream, and so I dreamed uncontrollably those first few weeks, sepia-toned episodes in which my parents jostled down our road in The Beverley Hillbillies truck, Jethro at the wheel, oblivious to our falling household goods, once in a while my mother called my name into the wind like Aunty Em called Dorothy, with the same sort of futility, it was not clear if they were under duress or experiencing a sort of relief.

This dichotomy was also true of my life.

Gradually I began wearing his things, his winter coat was too small so at night I picked seams and added wedges of fabric from Mr. White’s closet which Maggie opened for me, some plaid, some corduroy, I extended the arms, Maggie said how did you learn to sew like that? and I couldn’t tell her, I had not learned to sew but by observation and had never sewn before yet I could solve all things, Maggie opened a crate of supplies and notions, another of folded fabric, a third of patterns, these were new to me and fascinating, I barely did anything else that first year, I gave the scarecrows new clothes every season, I wore all my own creations and Maggie wore the dresses I made for her, word got out, the kids at school made fun of me at first and then they started asking if I could do bell-bottoms for them, what about a paisley shirt, does corduroy come in purple?

Maggie drew with permanent ink my initials, DM, on white scraps which I affixed as labels into everything I sold, I don’t know when she upside-downed the M and my initials turned to DW, but right around that time began Part Three of my life, when happiness came.