I am going to work today, walking to the train soon, it’s early and lovely and quiet, birds in the recording, I’ll beat the rush and the heat, weird getting there so early though – the cleaning guy always gives me the same old joke and sometimes before he says it I offer it up, the reason I got out of bed so early – but I’ve got a lot to do today, the work-to-hour ratio I mention in this story did not come out of thin air, also I really am wearing a bit of a halo today, I mean this story is fiction, mostly, my sister is not even a little bit zombie and my brother is fine, but there’s always truth, and these stories are places to store it, truth I mean, the little bits of life that matter now. Thanks for being here.

Unless It’s Raining by Sherry Cassells

I pretended to be doing homework all my childhood but was really writing, didn’t do homework, and now I pretend to be working, they are paying me right now, so if anybody were to ask me if I make a living with my writing I could say yes.

At first I wrote poems, childish of course, about running away (why would I stay) and not having any money (just a jar of honey) but I soon realized that poetry is a vehicle for truth, it’s a metered release of the profound, and I started going all the way across the page with my bullshit, weaving tangled webs, without repercussion, my mother was an actress, my father an inventor, my dying brother, my sister a part-time zombie.

Always a grain of truth, sometimes more, my brother was dying. Wait. In case that makes you want to stop reading I'll tell you right now he did not die. He was not medically cured, he did not endure treatment of any kind, he just got better, exactly like he did in my stories, the symptoms stopped, his colour came back, I used every scrap of time I had to write him back to health, he started eating again, he stayed up late, he teased me, I nearly failed grade six, he grew seven inches that summer and joined the swim team in the fall.

This piece is for him. He’s been a little under the weather lately. We are middle-aged.

My sister has done magnificently well convincing everyone of her normalcy, she married my fiend Mike – there goes Freud slipping again – she has three little pains in her zombie ass. My mother is an award-winning actress, a master of disguise, her Oscars are in my father’s laboratory, he melts them down limb by limb when he requires their specific metals to conduct his secret electricity.

We talk on the phone my brother and I, probably all people can tell when the person on the other end of the line is tired or maybe congested, etc., but I can tell when my brother has had a haircut, I know when he’s hungry, I feel it when he’s wearing that old school sweatshirt he borrowed – stole – last summer when he came to visit.

I know his numbers.

I haven’t written this much since I was a kid, I am writing all the time, last week I work-worked only six of my 40 hour week, but I was brilliant, my concepts were approved by the client in a heartbeat, I am somewhat of a hero.

My laptop is overworked, too hot to put on my lap without a pillow beneath it, I type through movies and whatever my wife watches, she keeps reminding me to stop typing so loud but it's like telling somebody not to snore, my thrum resumes and she says it again, we ebb like tide and shore, my brother-on-the-page is improving, last night during Sex in the City I thrummed he took his kid out to a ball game. I called him today and there was a ticking noise in the background, I imagined him hooked up to some drippy medical device but when I said what’s that ticking, he said it’s Brad breaking in his new glove, I said what new glove, he told me he and Brad had gone to the game last night and Brad won a glove for being in the right seat, and a baseball with the Jay’s logo on it.

I said are you wearing my sweatshirt? It was rhetorical.

There was a thunder storm last night, true story, there’s a patter on the roof now, you can just tell it’s going to keep on raining, my wife is defrosting the fridge. Yesterday when I was writing very hard about the baseball game she said you can’t just sit and write all day, you know, unless it’s raining.