WELCOME TO MY COLLECTION OF PUBLISHED WORK

I've been writing short and flash fiction since 2010. In 2023, I also began writing free-verse poetry. To this date, I've had forty-one short stories and a few free verse poems published. I'm submitting for publication less frequently now, but I get several stories accepted every year.

All my published work is scattered across the Internet, but I've collected the stories here. It's my equivalent of 'one-stop shopping'—just for you!

Browse to your heart's content, enjoying what you choose to read and making a note of a story or two to read later. Please tell your friends about my stories and invite them to drop by. 

I will add to this blog as each newly published piece of my writing becomes available. Some editors have exclusive rights that extend well beyond the published date; others let me post my story on this page as soon as it first appears in print. 

Over the years, I have built up a good inventory of unpublished stories. I frequently submit stories in hopes of securing publication. Many are rejected, and very few are accepted. 

This means that you will occasionally need to check back to 'Don Herald Stories' to discover newly published work.

Please respect that I've retained legal rights to each of my stories. Therefore, they cannot be copied and posted elsewhere. But ask me if you want to do something with one of my stories. I'm open to considering what you're proposing. But ask; please don't 'borrow' it from my page!

The photo at the top is entitled 'Wildfire In The Mountains'. I love the textures available in acrylic paint, so I experimented with them in this painting.


Thank you for stopping by.

Don

September 19, 2024

THE MAN WHO PAINTS

Strolling the Saturday Market, I come across a man who doesn’t belong. He doesn’t have a vendor stall like everyone else.

His eyes are clear, and the bright blue colour is oddly unsettling. He’s carefully watching the passing shoppers. He does not speak but occasionally nods and smiles. His teeth have seen much better days. They are mostly light brown except for the gold one, front center.

His gray-speckled beard is straggly. Food-stained yellow around the lips. Or perhaps from far too many unfiltered cigarettes. The thin, wispy hair is in desperate need of a good washing. Several different coloured shirts are layered beneath a well-worn canvas outdoor coat. The pants appear to be a nylon windproof. The cuffs are frayed and dirty. His boots, newish with thick rubber soles, seem too big for his feet. An Army Surplus backpack that looks like it has recently been to Afghanistan or maybe Ukraine lies beside him. A couple of hours ago, he was probably at one of the stoplights downtown, asking motorists for loose change.

But now the man is here. At the market. And he shouldn’t be.

But no one seems to mind.

The man has set up at the end of the first row of stalls closest to the main street. An upturned yellow Lumber Mart pail for a seat, a small easel beside, with a lightly soiled canvas that looked like it had been rescued from a waste bin that had refused to give it up easily.

Spread out on his knees is a battered tin tray with watercolour paints and two brushes alongside – one fine, the other a bit thicker. They look expensive, which doesn’t fit with the rest of him. On the ground, between his legs, is a white paper coffee cup cut down to one-third size. It’s empty.

A rough-cut cardboard sign leans precariously against the easel. The printing is done in careful, wide letters. That surprises me.

I will paint you.

Free.

Not everyone accepted.

Ask me.

I pause in front of him. I’d intended to continue on by looking for Dailey’s Apples.

But I stop.

He nods. Smiles.

I return his gaze.

‘You interested, sir?’

My mouth answers before it consults with my brain.

‘Yeah, I might be. What’s the deal?’

I flutter my fingers at everything, then point at his sign.

‘Not everyone accepted?’ I ask.

He smiles. The blue eyes quickly take me in. Top to bottom. Then return to my gaze.

‘Not everyone, sir. It’s all about energy. If I feel it coming off you, I’ll do your painting. If I don’t, well then, I’ll tell you where you can find the apple guy.’

How in hell did he know I was looking for Dailey’s? That’s just too weird.

I stare back at him. He’s waiting for me to ask.

‘Well?’  I pause. “Do I? Have the energy, I mean.’

‘Yep. I’ll paint you, sir. But first, there’s something you must do.’

He leans over between his legs, picks up the coffee cup, and gently offers it to me.

‘Put out your hand, sir. The left, please.’

I have a sudden feeling that, for him, the cup is the most precious possession he has.

I take the cup and nod.

‘Thanks. What do I do with it?’

‘Ah,’ he says. ‘That’s the tough part.’ He rearranges himself on the upturned bucket and leans toward me. He whispers.

‘I need you to put some of your tears in it. Not a lot. But some. Enough to wet the bottom of the cup.’

He pauses, carefully gauging my reaction to his request.

What the hell? My tears? Into a cup?

But in that weird moment, it feels like a totally reasonable request.

‘You want them now? Right here in the aisle?’

‘Whatever works for you, sir.’

That smile again.

‘If I may offer a suggestion? It helps to think about one of the saddest times of your life. Get into it. Let yourself go. When the tears start down your cheeks, collect them into the cup. Won’t take long before you have enough.’

He pauses.

‘Trust me, sir.’

People are rushing by. It’s noisy as Farmer’s Markets always are. The guy wants me to cry. On the spot. Out in public. No walking away and doing it in private.

‘OK, give me a couple of minutes.’

‘Take your time, sir. Such things, I know, they’re never easy.’

All at once, my world collapses inward. There’s only this guy and me. Nothing else matters right now.

The saddest time in my life? That’s easy. It’s my wife. She died a couple months ago. ALS. It was nasty. When she passed, my entire world became empty. I miss her terribly. I miss our intimacy. Her laugh. I miss the way she played joyously with our dogs. I miss her touch. I miss her smell. I miss the way she sorted and folded the laundry. For her, it had to be freshly warm right out of the dryer. I miss –

The man interrupts my thoughts.

‘Yes, sir. She was truly a special woman.’

There’s a sadness to his voice. ‘To be married for fifty-four years – well, these days, it’s a very long time.’

My god, how does he know about her? Know what I was thinking and feeling? Know how long we were married?

He’s a stranger to me. And yet, at this moment, he isn’t.

My cheeks are slick with tears. I place the cup on the left, then the right, back and forth until I have the bottom of the cup and then some—probably much more than he wants.

Silently, I hand back his cup. He glances inside. Gives a soft grunt.

‘Thank you, sir. Now it begins.’

He smiles.

He gets up from the pail, re-positioning it a couple of feet to the left. He picks up the easel and turns it slightly away from me. Just enough that I can’t see the full canvas.

He dips the thin-tipped brush into the cup and swirls it a bit in my tears. He removes the brush and places the wet tip onto a small pad of black powder in his tray. A line. Then another. Then many. There are many changes of brushes and colours. He dips into my tears, swirls, removes it, and then mixes it into the paint powders. I imagine sharp lines and colourful swaths are being placed onto the canvas.

I watch him intently working on the painting. He’s not looking back at me.

I’m standing a few feet away in the river of people pushing by. Minutes pass. I’ve no idea of time. The Saturday Market? It no longer exists for me.

He looks up.

‘I’m done.’ A pause. ‘Come close.’

He beckons me in from the aisle with a paintbrush still in hand.

He stands and steps aside to make way.

His painting sucks the air from my lungs in a wet gush.

This man, a stranger, has painted my wife perfectly. She’s smiling the way she always did – the slight promise of mischief always about to happen. She’s wearing her favorite blue sweatshirt, the one with the Orca on it. On the left hand is her sapphire wedding ring I gave to her in India many years ago.

His skill with watercolours is remarkable.

It’s as if I’m staring at her photograph.

‘My work here is done.’ He starts gathering up his things.

I’m looking at him, but words cannot come.

‘You’re wondering how,’ he smiles. ‘Well, sir, I’ll tell you a secret.’

Picking up the coffee cup, he examines it carefully, slowly turning it this way and that. Satisfied, he places it gently inside a glass jar wrapped in gray duct tape, screws down the metal lid, and slips it deep into the center fold of his backpack.

‘It’s the tears, sir. It’s all in your tears.’ 

First Published. September 17, 2024, in the American online magazine - A Thin Slice Of Anxiety.

The Backstory. I had a dream. It was emotionally powerful, and I awoke with a start. As so often happens in such matters, I could only remember a vague plot and character outline and the words which are the title of this piece. But I knew I must write about it right then. I began to write just after 3 am and by 8 am, I had a first draft.

Legal Rights. I own the rights to this story. Please don't 'borrow' it from this blog and publish it somewhere without my permission. Ask me. Tell me what you want to do with it. We will probably be able to work something out. 

DRY LAKE

My family is the third generation to have the Fulbright cabin on the south shore of Dry Lake. Right at the end of Trapper’s Bay.

We’d spend our summers there - from the day after school’s out to the day before school’s in. And then occasional days after that until just after the first serious freeze-up.

Our Thanksgivings have always been held there. Everyone who’s able gathers to celebrate stuff. Birthdays, anniversaries, marriages, divorces, school graduations, the birth of Selma’s annual litter-mongrels all. Our family lumps everything into one gathering –‘to save the Fulbright’s all the bullshit of this and that throughout the damn year,’ according to Gumpa Senior - our family’s curmudgeon extraordinaire. Now only a memory because Senior’s up there in the clouds or wherever will have him, bitching loudly about what he liked to call – ‘the whole god damn ball of wax.’

Senior’s daddy Frank ran a winter trap line around Dry Lake’s south shore back when the only road in was dirt and gravel, hacked out of the bush for three point five miles from Rural Route 21, which ran from Moseley in the east to Triumph in the west.

Frank’d work as a sales clerk in Eaton’s down in the city, Monday to noon on Fridays. He’d hop into his old beater right from work and make the four-hour trek to the trap line, where he had a tent, an old wooden rowboat, and a drying shed for the furs. Mink, beaver, rabbit, the occasional wolf, and the even more occasional martin – anything that moved on four legs was fair game for Frank’s traps. He wasn’t one to care much about ‘them god damn city slicker rules about what I can hunt.’ Come sundown on Sundays, he’d trek back to the city, arriving just in time to punch in at 6 a.m.

Family legend has it that Frank made arrangements with his boss at Eaton’s to shower and shave in the locker room, washing away the smell of the dead animals and woodsmoke. In winter, Frank would go part-time at the department store to spend more time tending to his trap line. He’d drive to a pull-off along Route 21 and snowshoe the rest of the way into Dry Lake.

In winter ‘44, he began harvesting timber, rough cutting it into planks, and building an all-season shelter. No more living in a tent for him. Once he had the necessary four walls and a reasonable roof, Frank began adding a bit here, a larger bit there. In a few years, he had what most would call a cabin. Frank’s wife Rita – my great-grandma – would take their kids up for the summer, and her husband came up on weekends.

And thus, a family summer tradition was born. Passed down through two more generations.

And this is where my story really begins.

The summer I was twelve, almost thirteen, there was a mystery to solve at our place on Dry Lake. Stuff started disappearing. Silver-plated fishing lures. A bright red spin top. Yellow pencils. Twine by the yard. Fresh cedar shavings from beside the whittling stump. My sister’s favourite hand mirror. And then, food. Apples, nuts, half a banana, cookies left out by mistake, orange slices. One time – ok, maybe it was a couple of times - an entire family-size bag of potato chips. You get the picture.

We had our suspicions but had no real proof.

My sister was more freaked out about the disappearances than me. I was more interested in Eliza across the bay, a summer-long guest of the Fitzpatrick’s. Fifteen years old with nothing to do but lie on the dock in her black one-piece, read trashy romance novels, and write bad poetry in her journal.

I made a habit of paddling our old Peterborough canoe to the east shore, then along just in front of the Fitzpatrick’s dock whenever Eliza was sunning there. By then, I’d have my shirt off so she could see my teenage muscles rippling with every stroke of the paddle. I’d wave. She’d wave. Sometimes, she’d slowly stand up, stretch long and easy like a cat, and then wave. Oh, boy, that always made my long paddle worth it.

We never said a word to each other the entire summer. But a thirteen-year-old hormonally powered boy doesn’t need real words as long as he has imagination. Oh, the conversations we had! Eliza was my first true love. On Fitzpatrick’s dock. In the sunshine. In that sleek but deliciously rounded black one-piece. Writing me passionate and sexually explicit love poetry in her small journal with the stiff red cardboard cover.

But, to get back to the mystery.

From the day my fresh waffles started disappearing, I decided to get serious about solving the mystery.

Mom would always be up by six. She had her routines at Dry Lake. Make some coffee and head down to our small dock just as the sun rose above the eastern shoreline. The dock always quietly creaked up and down under her weight.

She smoked one, sometimes two, cigarettes, blowing the smoke above her head. Sometimes, if the morning air was still, she’d blow rings within rings that would lift, expand, break apart, and disappear. I often wondered what she thought about in those private times out on the dock.

Her life wasn’t easy married to my Dad, a tough, no-nonsense ironworker from the smokey mills in Hamilton. She’d reluctantly married into the Fulbright clan. Some would always say she ‘married down,’ but a baby waits for no man or woman, so a quickie civil ceremony was arranged at Hamilton City Hall. I appeared seven months later. Instant family. And a ‘summer house’ on Dry Lake as a wedding gift.

Mom would make a plate of six waffles, smother it in syrup brought up in gallon jugs from the city, set it out on the long table, and call at me – ‘Your waffles are up, Ritchie. Rise and shine. The day’s half gone.’

Some days that’d work, and I’d crawl out of bed, wrap myself in a sheet, and dig in. Most days, however, I’d leave the waffles getting cold until later in the morning. For breakfast, the only thing better than hot waffles is cold waffles.

By early July, Mom had figured out I had a thing for Eliza over at the Fitzpatricks. I suspect my sister told her, but she denies it, even to this day.

 ‘I think I see that girl out on the Fitzpatrick’s dock,’ she’d yell at me. That got me going the first few times, but I knew from watching Eliza through binoculars that she never made it onto the dock until close to noon. Like me, Eliza was a late riser. I often wondered what it would be like to be lying beside her when Mom would call out about the waffles.

After Mom set my waffles on the table, she’d do her chores elsewhere in the cottage or outside in the veggie garden she was struggling with between our back door and the outhouse. My sister loved to garden, and she was always out there with her. My plate of steaming waffles and syrup was left unprotected. They began disappearing, day after day.

The Fulbright cottage always remained rough-built. It was another of those family traditions held sacred by the men of the Fulbright clan. If you have to fix or make something at the family home on Dry Lake, build it quick, build it rough, build it to last. It didn’t matter if boards were a tad short, a bit too thick. ‘Don’t worry over it too much, Ritchie,’ my Dad would always say. ‘This is Dry Lake, my boy. It ain’t Forest Hill. That board’s good enough.’

So, I’m understating it to tell you that the place had a few spaces in the walls, floor, and ceiling. Great for letting in mosquitos, stink bugs, and some of the largest, meanest-looking spiders you’ll ever come across in cottage country. When you combine those holes with a plate of delicious waffles smothered in the sweetest maple syrup – well, it spells nothing but an opportunity for a mother red squirrel and her brood of four little ones.

We called her Hoppy. She hopped like a rabbit but climbed trees. At Dry Lake, almost everything is not what it seems. Hoppy was raising her hungry little family inside a large cavity in the fork of the ancient spruce between our cottage and the dock. She’d sit on a solid branch that stretched out toward the window above our sink. From her perch, she could easily look right into our place. She didn’t miss a thing.

So it was that Hoppy didn’t miss my waffles. Her nose told her a pile of stuff in there was worth investigating. It was an easy jump from the end of the bouncing limb to a hole beneath the shingles, along the attic rafter to one of those ‘good enough’ holes in the ceiling above the bedroom door, down the wall ending in a longish but not impossible leap onto the table. One cautious hop, pause, then another cautious hop, pause, and then - dig in. Hoppy made short work of those waffles. She’d eat some, save some for her kids, retrace her hops back to the nest, drop off chunks of the waffle to the squealing little ones, and then return quickly to the waffles. She’d repeat this each and every day that I didn’t beat her to those waffles first.

Now that I knew how she got into our place, I could’ve quickly boarded up the holes. But the Fulbright home on Dry Lake has more holes than solid board, so what was the point?

That summer, Hoppy and I made a deal. ‘Some mornings, it’s yours; other mornings, it’s mine.’ Early bird gets the worm and all that stuff.

I knew that Eliza would love the story of Hoppy and the waffles. She’d surely write a poem about it and read it to me over the dying embers of our campfire on a deserted beach on Shudder Lake—only in my dreams. I never told her. A poem was never written. Another opportunity lost.

Oh, there’s one other thing.

I’m sure you’ve been wondering about this little ‘Fulbright Fact’ since you started reading my story: How can a lake be called Dry Lake? I mean, almost by definition, aren’t all lakes in Ontario full of water? Lots of water?

Family legend has it that when the first Fulbright discovered the lake in 1940, he and Jack Daniel were very close friends. One day, while under the spell of Jack, great-grandpa Frank chopped off a big toe when he should’ve chopped a chunk of wood. He nearly bled to death but packed the injury with tree moss, poured liberal amounts of Jack on the wound, and swore he’d never touch a drop again. When he was sober, he called the water all around him Dry Lake.

At least, that’s what family legend says happened.

First Published. January 16, 2024, in Canada's 'CommuterLit'.

The Backstory. This is one of those story ideas that just pops into one's head for no true rhyme or reason. I remember that I enjoyed writing the early drafts. When I was a kid, I dreamed about the young woman in that tight, revealing black bathing suit appearing on the neighbour's dock on a hot July afternoon in the Kawarthas. Maybe that's where the idea for this cottage story had its origins.

Legal Rights. I own the rights to this story. Please don't 'borrow' it from this blog and publish it somewhere without my permission. Ask me. Tell me what you want to do with it. We will probably be able to work something out. 

 

STELLA - ROSE

I could never understand her poetry, so I stopped reading it. 

If truth be told, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. This is probably the more accurate depiction: I could never understand her, so I stopped trying.

Back in the heady days of first love, I was attracted to her ‘alternative’ vibe. Stella-Rose was fifteen when we met. She was already hanging out in the booze cans of Yorkville, reading her stifling poetry at open mikes, chain-smoking French Gauloises and falling for a Montreal poet named Leonard Cohen, whom she loved but had never met.

Stella-Rose’s parents always thought their precious daughter – odd though her clothing and hobbies were – was staying over at Mercedes’ house. In their innocence, they never thought it unusual that every Friday and Saturday night during the summer of ‘62, Mercedes held a ‘sleepover.’

Mercedes’ parents never thought to check with Stella-Rose’s parents if their daughter was staying there for the weekend. Both young women played their parents’ innocence beautifully.

September to June, they’d change into their Yorkville costumes in the locker room at school on Friday afternoon, hop the 4:15 Go train to Union Station, then walk or bus the fifteen blocks north to Yorkville. The summer of ‘62, they’d change in the restroom at Union, stow their suburban girl gear in a locker, then head uptown. 

They had the entire process dialed in. It never failed them until it did.

In the summer of ‘62, Stella-Rose babysat for the McIntyre’s – our next-door neighbours from Monday to Thursday. Both parents worked, so Stella-Rose had the run of their place provided she kept a serious eye on the two younger McIntyres – Sofia, age six and Henri, age four. She did an excellent job of it, I must say. She’d give them crafts to do out by the pool while she sat under a large yellow umbrella, writing her terrible poetry and strumming tunelessly on an old beat-up Martin she’d found at the United Church rummage sale back in March.

That summer, I was home recovering from mono, so I’d slip over to the McIntyre’s pool and listen to Stella-Rose’s angst-filled prose that she read aloud to ‘better catch the rhythms and passion of my words.’

I could never figure out what the hell she was trying to say in her lines. But it didn’t matter because Stella-Rose loved her words and thoughts more than enough for both of us.

I want to tell you that Stella-Rose and I were going steady back then. I loved her as only a fifteen-year-old, hormonally super-charged boy could. But for Stella-Rose, I was only an asexual audience of one for her poetry, music, and shared fantasies of a sexually steamy life with Cohen or sometimes Dylan.

Of course, her black, two-piece bathing suit that left just enough for my youthful imagination to feed on – well, let’s say that it wasn’t her stupid poetry that made me love her; it was my out-of-control fantasies of that black bathing suit that drew me to her. Like a summer moth to a bright, hot flame.

One Saturday evening, it all ended.

Unknown to Stella-Rose and Mercedes, Stella-Rose’s parents were attending a client dinner party at the Intercontinental on the evening of September 15^th. While waiting in the hotel lobby for Mr. Roxton’s clients to arrive, Mrs. Roxton happened to see her daughter stroll by on the arm of a bearded, beaded and bombed-out-of-his-mind beatnik kid of indeterminate age.

‘Oh, my god, that’s our Stella-Rose out there,’ shouted Mrs. Roxton.

‘What in hell is she wearing? Hey, wait a minute. Isn’t that Mercedes with her? Shit, Roger, this can’t be happening to us.’

But it was.

The client’s party was missed. A lucrative business opportunity lost.

For the girls, their Yorkville gig was up.

Of course, there was a scene when a frantic Mr. and Mrs. Roxton rushed out onto the sidewalk in front of the Intercontinental and snatched their daughter from the arms of that dissolute man-child.

I’m told it was epic as such ‘rescue’ scenes go.

Someone called the police. There was a lot of shouting, swearing and impossible threats. Stella-Rose apparently kicked one of the officers trying to restrain her. The girls ended up in back of a cruiser on their way to a meeting with a grumpy Sergeant at 53 Division. A totally pissed beat cop angrily ordered her parents to ‘find your damn car. Get your asses over to the 53. It’s on Eglinton, just west of Yonge. Obviously, we’ve all got some serious sorting out to do.’

Stella-Rose never returned to our school. Her father accepted a transfer to the Winnipeg office, so the family left our neighbourhood within a couple of weeks.

Of course, many stories were flying around school for weeks about what happened that night in Yorkville. Mercedes knew, but she wasn’t talking. Her silence just added to the delicious mystery of it all. And that’s just how she wanted it.

Many years later, I sometimes wonder what happened to Winnipeg’s Stella-Rose.

Is she still writing poetry?

Poetry I could never understand back in the sixties. Probably not even now.

First Published. May 4, 2023, in the Canadian e-zine CommuterLit.

The Backstory. I spent my teenage years in Clarkson, a small bedroom community just west of Toronto. The hippie culture of Yorkville in the city's downtown was in full cultural bloom. It was a magnet for teens and others from all over Canada.

Later, when I was just about all grown up, I worked for a child welfare agency. On my caseload, I had a fourteen-year-old girl who was a parent's worst nightmare. She constantly ran away from her group home, and I'd have to go on a hunt to find her in some of the worst flop pads in our town.

It is this outrageous young woman on whom I model Stella-Rose.

Legal Rights. 

SOMETHING DROPPED FROM THE SKY

Arnold ‘Bird’ Swicker dropped silently from the sky precisely between his father’s new Case corn planter and the open barn door.

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.

Bird and I’ve been friends since pre-school. Back then, it was that magical summer space between graduating public school and starting Saunders Secondary an hour away in the rust brown-yellow bus driven a tad recklessly by Bert Goodwin, brother of the mayor, relative-by-marriage-then-messy-divorce to Grace Longdon, Chairwoman of the Temple Lake School Board.

Arnie first believed he should be able to fly – ‘just like that ol’ red-tailed hawk that flies over Foster’s barn looking for a quick meal of chicken wings’ – when we found a plump dead pigeon under my parent’s backyard feeder.

We were ten.

‘We should bury the poor thing,’ I said to Arnie. ‘Give it a decent burial.’

‘Hell, no, Twix, I’m going to take it apart. Figure out what makes it tick. Look at all those feathers on its wings. I’m taking them home to look at under my Doc Evan’s microscope.’ And so he did.

After about a week, Arnie’s mom, looking for the source of a putrid smell coming from Arnie’s room, discovered the rotting, wormy pigeon carcass on the window sill behind the pulled-down blind where Arnie was hiding it from prying eyes. He was grounded for a week and lost the pigeon. But his autopsy on that dead pigeon ignited my friend’s passion for flying.

I remember Arnie asking the school librarian – a Miss Lopo-Suarez – to find him all the books she could that dealt with flying. As I recall, she found four on the library shelves and brought one from home – The Wright Brothers by Fred C. Kelly. ‘My husband’s a pilot,’ she said by way of an explanation which wasn’t.

From then on, flying was all my friend ever talked about. It didn’t take long before everyone started calling him ‘Bird.’

High up in the hayloft of his barn, Bird began putting together his first set of flight ‘wings.’ ‘No point startin’ with the fuselage, Twix. I need to learn what it feels like to fly solo with some homemade wings.’

‘But you can’t ever fly like that ol’ red-tail, Bird. Not ever gonna happen.’

But Bird was set on it. I helped him secretly construct a set of wings from salvaged wood from the cut-offs pile out behind the barn and taped together cardboard sheets we cut from boxes ‘liberated’ from the liquor store and Foodmart in town. On our bikes, we’d carried a lot of flat cardboard boxes from town out to Bird’s farm.

Bird personally cut his ‘flight feathers’ from the cardboard sheets, using a design he drew up in his room at night when his parents thought he was fast asleep. Using some paste-type glue he found in his Dad’s machine shop, Bird carefully anchored each stiff cardboard feather to the left and right side wooden frames. Old leather belts from the bottom drawer of his Dad’s dresser strapped a feathered wing frame securely to each arm. Up in the loft, Bird practiced flapping his wings in a rapid motion he roughly patterned off of the wingbeats of the Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds that were so plentiful in his family’s ‘Victory’ garden.

On the morning of the second Wednesday in August, Bird announced that he was ready to try out the wings. His father was out harvesting in the backfield, and his mother was in town with the United Church women planning their annual Fall fundraiser. There would be no parents around to get in the way.

‘Just you and me, Twix. It’s gonna be fun.’

‘I’m going to launch from the barn peak up there and glide over to the driveshed.’

He pointed out at the shed, easily a half-football field away. It was a crazy idea, but I’d learned a long time ago there was no luck trying to talk sense to Bird when it had anything to do with flying.

I nodded, ‘Good luck,’ and headed down from the loft to a position halfway between the barn and the driveshed.

Bird had practiced climbing from the hayloft onto the edge of the barn’s tin roof and carefully wiggling his way to the peak about twenty feet higher up. Lying on his back alongside the ridge, he unhooked the wing frames from his backpack, then shimmied his way into each wing, cinching the belt straps tightly to his arms.

Once strapped in, Bird made a slow standing motion until he was slowly swaying upright at the peak, wings extended out like that Christ statue hanging from the cross above the main doors at Lady of Mercy RC church across from City Hall.

Flapping his wings in a modified up-down Hummingbird motion, Bird leaned way out beyond the safety of the barn roof peak.

He launched himself into the swirling air currents.

Bird dropped like a giant, brown feathered turd to the barnyard at least fifty feet below. His arms were still beating as he hit the ground in a slow side roll to the left, Bird’s strong side. It was the beating of his arms that saved him.

The left wing hit first, shattering the wooden and cardboard frame into chunks and Bird’s arm and shoulder into three distinct pieces. Followed by three ribs cracking on that side while his forehead bounced off the grass and rocks in front of the Case planter. Somehow, Bird’s right wing and arm survived the fall. The whole thing sounded like when we threw a watermelon from Bird’s mother’s garden out the hayloft door, which exploded with a deep, watery thwack into the barnyard.

Bird wasn’t moving. Unconscious. His left arm and wing frame were twisted in odd shapes over his body. Blood was beginning to trickle from his nose. What appeared to be one of Bird’s front teeth was lying just in front of his open mouth. He was a mess.

I ran into the farmhouse and dialed 9-1-1, yelled the situation into the phone and ran back out into the barnyard.

Volunteer firefighters began arriving in their farm trucks, blue emergency lights strobing on dashboards or fastened to driver-side roofs. They made Bird as comfortable as possible and waited for the Firehall ambulance from town.

Bird recovered, but it took the rest of the summer and into the first months of high school. But he never gave up his wish to fly like the red-tailed hawk that soared every couple of days over the barnyard.

I’m sharing this memory of Bird’s first flight with the cardboard wings because I was just talking to him on the phone.

He called from Changi Airport in Singapore. His plane leaves for Vancouver in about an hour.

He’s not a passenger.

He’s the captain: of a Boeing 777-300ERs – the largest international long-haul passenger jet in the Air Canada fleet.

Everyone still calls him Bird. Even his parents.

First Published. April 17th, 2023, in the popular Canadian e-zine CommuterLit.

The Backstory. As a kid, I was fascinated by flight. I wanted to fly high as the birds in my backyard. So I built some beautiful wings of stiff cardboard that I glued onto crudely constructed wooden frames. In front of my friends, I climbed to the top of my parent's garage and jumped. I fell about ten feet, shattered the wings and my dream. I never flew again.

Decades later, I decided to write a story about a kid's passion for flight. 'Something Fell...' is his story.

Legal Rights.  I own the rights to this story. Please don't 'borrow' it from this blog and publish it somewhere without my permission. Ask me. Tell me what you want to do with it. We probably will be able to work something out.

TWENTY BEES

Bitter. An after-taste that remains an hour or so later.

To be honest, I’m not a natural wine drinker.

But for the past while, I’ve been sipping some of hers.

To make her laugh.

I noisily slurp, smacking my lips just for the sheer theatre of it.

She likes a dram of red wine with her evening meal.

A meal that seems to be getting smaller each passing week.

Twenty Bees – that’s her choice of wine.

Red. Never white.

Canadian, I’m pretty sure.

Only twenty bees were harmed in the making of this wine.

That’s not on the label.

I pour from the large bottle into a small crystal tumbler.

Two inches in the bottom - for her.

Another inch on top - for me.

I swirl it around, giving it air. I think air adds flavor. But I don’t know for sure.

I bring it to the dinner table.

Hunched over, she peeks from under a fuzzy fringe of white-gray hair.

‘Your wine,’ I say, holding the tumbler in my hand. ‘Twenty Bees. Your favourite.’

She smiles.

Then, I slurp it. Loudly. Pretending to like it.

Sometimes I get carried away with the slurping. My shirt front blossoms red.

She laughs.

I remember that special laugh, but now a soft giggle’s thrown in.

‘Oh. My. God,’ she says.

It’s her favourite saying these days.

Except for ‘You’re weird,’ which she says quite often.

At least to me.

‘Not too much,’ she says.

‘No worries,’ I say.

I set the tumbler down.

Another smile.

A hand, brown freckles in abundance, eases out, slim fingers surround the glass.

‘Ah,’ she says. ‘You’re weird.’

She sips - like a tiny bird from raindrops puddled within a leaf.

‘Ah,’ she says again.

Thin, pale lips smacking, just like me.

There’s an after-taste that lingers long after dinner.

It isn’t the wine.

It’s the memories of what once was.

Forever lost.

‘You’re weird,’ she whispers.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I am.’

First Published. In CommuterLit, June 17, 2021.

The Backstory. This story is about my life in the year of a pandemic. Serious illness has come to my family - unwanted, life altering and challenging to everyone. I write about some parts of it, just to gain perspective. Occasionally, I share a story with a wider audience beyond family and close friends. This is one of those stories.

Legal Rights. I own the rights to this story. Please don't 'borrow' it from this blog and publish it somewhere without my permission. Ask me. Tell me what you want to do with it. We probably will be able to work something out.

THE BALL JAR

 

THE BALL JAR

Grandma Ruth lived for canning - almost anything that grew on trees or in the ground. Summer and Fall, sealed bottles of preserved this and that began to line up, three and four deep, on the rough board shelving she had in the 'cold room.' Whenever possible, she liked to use Ball-made jars, but in a pinch, she'd take any glass bottle that could be sterilized on her stovetop, seal tightly and still be good months later.

Unfortunately, canning skills didn't pass down from Grandma Ruth to her daughter Beth, my mother. I remember the two women quarrelling over it. 'Too much bloody work, mama, when I can go down to Fresh Stop and pick what I need - in a can, right off the shelf. Or pull from a bin in the vegetable and fruit section.' After many years of disagreeing, both just grew tired of the fight and withdrew to their respective corners of our family's generational ring.

Grandma Ruth canned until she died in 1966; my mother avoided the hot topic of canning but deliberately went out of her way to buy more tin cans of this and that then could reasonably be expected to be consumed in two lifetimes. I've always believed it was Beth's way of sticking the finger at her mother for all their years of quarrelling over the god damned Ball jars taking up space in the walk-in pantry and the daughter's unforgivable moral corruption of not embracing her mother's religion of canning.

When Grandma Ruth died, Beth and her sister Evie reluctantly went to their mother's home to clean it out wall to wall in readiness for a quick sale in a scorching metro city marketplace. I went along on that first day just because I knew Beth was determined to start with Grandma Ruth's many shelves of Ball jars.

I wanted to bear silent witness to Grandma's obsession with Ball jars – empty or full.

Beth, Evie and I arrived at Grandma's about the same time. Mom and Evie got side-tracked by a painting hanging over the faux fireplace on our way back to the pantry. Mom insisted it was a genuine Lawren Harris and worth 'a crapload of money'; Aunt Evie believed it to be 'a god damn real good fake, not worth than a couple hundred max.'

While they quarrelled like only sisters can do, I went into Grandma Ruth's pantry. Six shelves high, each twelve feet long and one foot deep, her Ball jars lined up like silent foot soldiers waiting to go into battle.

Except for one.

An empty Ball jar, minus a sealing lid, light blue tinted glass with the letters' Ball - Perfect Mason' visible in the light from a 100-watt bulb dangling from the ceiling. On the top shelf – not an easy reach for my tiny Grandma, but an easy one for me at well over six feet.

I took it down, holding it carefully in my hands. I blew away layers of dust that had gathered on it over many years out of the way on the top shelf. The jar was imperfect, tiny air bubbles imprisoned within it, small ridges of glass and blue dye appearing in random patterns.

I could only imagine why Grandma had kept this Bell jar apart from the others. It was too beautiful to abuse its space with pedestrian fruits and vegetables. It should be admired. It should be kept in a special place. It needed a particular person to keep it safe from the imminent onslaught of the non-believers - Beth and Evie.

I was that particular person.

Over the years, since I rescued my Ball jar from Grandma's pantry, it has served me well in so many ways.

For a few years, I kept pencils in it. Also, broken ballpoints that I saved for spare parts. Magic markers sometimes took up space there, too – the smelly kind that little kids and I love to sniff loudly, always leaving yellow, red or blue ink dabs on the tips of our noses.

After returning from my post-college 'grand tour of Europe, Asia and Australia,' I put samples of each country's coins in Grandma's blue Ball jar. I filled it up. It weighed a ton. So it did double duty as a paperweight on my office desk.

One Christmas, I got a mesh bag of brightly coloured small marbles. I emptied the Ball jar of its contents and filled it to overflowing with the marbles. I kept it on my writing desk for a couple of years.

Once, someone in my family – no one ever admitted to it – removed the marbles, replacing them with coloured sand. 'It's calming,' my wife said. 'Bound to help your writing when you're so chill.' The coloured sand didn't live up to the promise, so I replaced it with a few dried flowers.

A few years ago, I emptied Grandma's blue Ball jar, washed it out and left it empty, sitting in the sunlight on the window sill above my writing desk. Occasionally, I rinse it out and pour in a cold beer or chocolate milk.

Of all the things that have filled up Grandma's beautiful jar over the years, I think the best thing is the memories.

The other day, my daughter asked, 'Dad, when you're gone, can you leave me Grandma's Ball jar? I promise I'll take good care of it – for both you and Grandma.'

I think I'll do just as she asks.

Grandma Ruth would be pleased.

First Published. In Potato Soup, May 25, 2021.

The Backstory. This tale is mostly made up, but some elements popped right onto the computer screen from my own experience over the years with a special Ball canning jar. Most writers, I think, have an object or a few objects that inspire their creativity on the page or computer screen. An antique, blue Ball jar is one of mine.

Legal Rights. I own the rights to this story. Please don't 'borrow' it from this blog and publish it somewhere without my permission. Ask me. Tell me what you want to do with it. We probably will be able to work something out.