Horseshoe Literary Magazine

Horseshoe III.i

Contents

A day stuck within slumber

Michelle Woodfine

Twilight dawns on a city still not yet woken,
Sun shifts her sleepy legs to the end of the couch,
She must have set out here again.
Gazed upon this mid-morning beauty,
The heat of her breath kisses my skin,
Arms grow out-stretched intentions.
I'll crawl back in,
Fading into some idea of comfort.

Cloud will dance in the kitchen,
Cooling us down with dimmed afternoon fog.
He will wash the dishes to the same song,
Water will reach the floor in slight mist forms.
A murmur when the music gets it wrong again.
Listen for hints of blues with a lack of loneliness.

As the day ends longer,
A walk back from stop to start shines nightly importance.
The moon carves a friendly smile in passing.
Behind, Meek stars unfold their small curious eyes.

Making us slightly more human than yesterday.
…

Abandoned

Bruce McRae

Our waiter has gone wandering
the wildwoods and wastelands.
Our waiter was last seen heading west,
along unchartered waterways,
and may very possibly be following the wind,
his absence revealing our limitations,
our frailties, our flaws.

Our waiter has abandoned us to fortune.
The seasons change. The constellations alter.
And still no hope, no sign of his return.
No amount of wailing or gnashing of teeth,
no appeal, will keep us from our predicament.
We are as if little children after a plane crash,
stunned and bloodied, whimpering softly.
We sit. We await our inevitable end.

Another Sunset

Chelsea Humphries

It reaches out, warmth looking for warmth.
It travelled such a long way
through the wind-chapped trees,
those birches pink with cold,
that I cannot fathom why it lingers.
Gathered inwards against the icy air,
for a moment, I feel everything and nothing
while it investigates me and softly
presses up against my shadow,
until a feather—a foot—a leaf trembles,
and something of eternity is lost.

I depart, holding close the familiar
while the light dims and the birds
bundle into their homes.

Like This

Chelsea Humphries

There is a melody in the air:
watch it swing up and to the right
before it lands dramatically
in the ball of dough;
we dance for our tender lives
in a marathon across the floor;
we romance the crummy kitchen
on Mondays and Sundays,
made of bread and cheese, and
groceries and dishes and
ripening time. We dance,
together, laughing and crying
in bright waves by the oven,
your hand in mine,
like this.

Grace

Nathanael O’Reilly

After Thomas McCarthy’s Rebellion


My classmates bullied me relentlessly,
slammed my head against steel lockers, wrote slurs
on the blackboard before teachers arrived,
refused to pass me the ball, shut me out,
mocked me, punched me in the back of the head,
but I prefer to remember the girls
wearing short green and white summer dresses,

long smooth bare brown legs stretched out under desks,
open buttons and zips revealing skin
above hips, glimpses of growing cleavage.
I prefer to remember the beauty,
the kindness and affection rarely shown,
the arm draped around my shoulder, the kiss
gifted on my cheek in front of the class

by the most beautiful girl in year nine,
the high-jump champion resting her head
against the back of my neck while waiting
in line outside the pizza shop, the grace
my gorgeous crush displayed dancing on stage
wearing sheer tights and a nude leotard
playing Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Charm

Shane Ellis Coates

Summer, Circa 19 Sixty-two:
On the kitchen table, brazen among the supper plates
A knife rests by chance on its handle and spine
The likeness of an overturned boat
The edge of its keel vicious by design
If not measure

A surly little dog lying in wait
For the brush of a careless hand;
And the shareman Johnny Dobbin says
To the oldest girl, he says

You mind
My words: From now on when you see a knife resting
On its handle and spine, you will think of me.
And she will

Every Single Time

Dinner in Patras, Greece

AD Capili

I.
The Peloponnesian sky was a layered cake
of chestnut beneath cherry red, red below peach
melting under the sun fighting
its ordered descent,
leaving in its wake an adamant warmth
mingling with the scent of fatty meats
roiling above glowing charcoal and embers,
while smoke wafted to the canopy of ivies,
a shriveling shock of greens and desert sand.

II.
Before the dakos, pites, and souvlakia came,
frazzled fur clinging to a lean frame
approached,
first with meek meows,
followed by a tentative touch of the tail,
then an emboldened body brushing against bare,
tanned and lotioned legs and feet.

III.
The members of the family baby-talked
their apologies for withholding scraps.

IV.
Unfed, the kitten wordlessly slipped
into the low thicket of laurels and oleanders
only to reappear tightrope-walking across
the darkened road roamed by headlights
blind to the fate of homeless lives.

V.
On the trek back to their resort hotel
the family slowed down on the sidewalk
to gawk at the half moon,
a half eaten fruit, its pinkish flesh exposed
and hanging low in the sky,
illuminating
below it a clowder of strays
sitting, suspended on top of an olive green
dumpster smeared with dust and goo,
waiting
perhaps for the night
to turn kinder and cool.

Laurel Ode

Charlotte Lilley

Laurel branches reaching
ever skyward, twist to move away
as some ill-meaning wind white flowers
buffets ever backward

Slender limbs encased in
green-grey bark, a soft reminder,
lovely face in terror rictus covered over,
bright voice silenced

Bodies still are bodies,
wood or meat carved out to shape
Apollo’s lyre, victim’s flesh crowns victors,
trapped forever, battle’s over

Transmutation

Charlotte Lilley

Smoke has substance. No harmless vapour but a weighty thing, particles and fragments of all that burns caught and carried, lifted over borders and boundaries. Polluting and polluted, tainted by the manifold flavours of its consumption, it chokes the sky, silences singers. In scientific circles it is PM 2.5, fine particulate matter, a measurement of microns smaller than a human hair is wide, small enough indeed to make a home in the lungs, to nest itself in veins and in arteries. A heavy, heady infiltration, toxicity-tinged. I spend a summer breathing in the debris of fires raging half a world away, wondering how many forests – homes – livelihoods – lives I now carry within my blood. And then I wonder if it matters, really. It’s all just carbon, after all.

Prince Dies at 99

D.C. Buschmann

Like older cars, these mortal bodies rust and wear out
no matter how immortality rankles our sensibilities.

Older frames don't move the same. Operating systems 
last only so long, even if top experts tweak them.

Bondo and fresh paint patch up dents and dings.
Over time they crack and wrinkle.

While frequent tune-ups improve performance, and add life
short-term, even complete overhauls are short-lived.

Extra time can’t be bought when our expiration dates are up.
We sputter along till our engines stop.

A prince takes his last breath just like the rest of us.
Titles, money, and holdings won’t extend warranties.

What happens next is anyone’s guess, but I imagine
Bentleys and VWs will pass through the same gate.

Lectio

Logan Ropson

I.
Wrapped in musky quilts and bedtime stench, I drifted to the sound of narration.
Found joy in the tales you spun, each thread weaving together an acumen blanket, 
that I would find warmth in all my life. As the plot lines dance on the ceiling above
my subconscious rejoiced that stories always end in a happy sense, with that sleep. 

II.
As a young boy I read comic books, and drank sugar-laced drinks, which painted my insides 
Kryptonite green. I dreamt of super speed and radioactive spider bites, as bright colours and 
bold letters made me feel alive. On Sunday I would race to the used book bins in the back of the 
bank, it was my phone booth, and I danced to the hum of coloured pencils that brought belief.

III.
In middle school I was taught the way of the modern world, to put away those fairy tales, and in 
return walk the digital age. A plumber crushes a turtle, a hedgehog breaks the sound barrier, 
and Dr. Richtofen masters the undead. “Reading is for nerds” I would laugh, as my X-box turned 
 a Jonny Cash song, but they were text, they are always text, poetry in motion, morals in action.

IV. 
At sixteen I met the Bard and read about the tragedy of the swollen foot king. My English
teacher would preach, like a fresh bloomed flower in the canon garden of finer-art. At that age 
I rolled sonnet 18 tightly and smoked the words to ash, frying my brain with a combo of 
pretty prose and herb, I felt those words deep in my subconscious showing me the way. 

V. 
Now I see texts wherever I go. In rain I see the tears of giants, in the flowers I see 
the heartbeat of the universe, in old books I see the only true reflection of our past, in
my grandfather’s hand I see the labours of a life well lived; in a love poem I see the tender kiss 
of a broken heart, and as my fingers hit the keys, and the pen inks the paper I see my soul.

Miller’s Island

Logan Ropson

Eagle-nest island wrapped 
in eerie glow,
in Persephone’s garden 	
lay TB ridden souls.
She grows pomegranates as humpback feed,
nonbelievers discard headstones 
which shine with pearls
in water’s grave,
the ocean now still 
as the dead
resting in the graves above.

Trees blow in an easterly gale,
sea gulls fill the air with 
starving cries.
The wooden boat rocks 
on the swells, 
oak oars splinter 
lime paint,
codfish lay in their own blood.
Soon the evening fog 
darkens the bay.

We Loved

Edward Lee

Does the sun,
which rose in our bedroom,
curtains open,
miss seeing us wake
from our slumber,
love apparent
in our every movement,

or does it simply,
indifferently,
shine on whoever
occupies that room now,
the memory of us
no more than dust dancing
in its ray, the love apparent
apparently not enough?


My Dog Completes a Questionnaire

Michael Penny

Name?
The one you use
when it’s time for walkies.

Gender?
Definitely
what it used to be.

Address?
What sniffs
like home.

Phone?
The numbers that add up
to my collar code.

Email Address?
That tree,
an odour left.

Occupation?
The time allowed for feed
poop, and pee.

Birth Date?
Divided by seven
that magic prime

Religion?
Worship of an old typo
that could be accurate.

Favourite Colour?
None, as none
have odour

Financial Position?
A full bag of treats
and their handing out

Citizenship?
Of the country canine
and the province of off leash

Our Refrigerator

Michael Penny

Our refrigerator broke down,
after being loyal for 12 years.

the food complained
and began fuzzy thinking
about its state.

I called for repair,
and the experts came,
pronouncing parts and time

but warning that every appliance
has a life expectancy
shorter than our own.

The guts of my fridge
lay bare, as panels were unscrewed
and probes here and there

found a list of possibles.
Nothing was sure
except we had to try.

All is machine in space,
whether to keep food safe
or operate the stars

flying away from us
in an expanse colder
than any kitchen place.

The Fully-Furnished Forest

Michael Penny

I live in a fully-furnished forest—
the shop-display requirement of trees
and an adequate selection of animals.

The birds are particularly chirpy,
with trees for landing (nests and intoxicating
berries) and always just enough sky.

Insects share that sky but reluctantly,
as they whirr their sudden moves
above a soil that rock grew.

And I hear in that soil
the busy microbes as they work
the decomposition that’s life.

Please Take the Tears Away

Dwayne Swift

She was a lonely house bound girl
Having no friends to call her own
With an old radio she would twirl
Up in her bedroom dancing alone

She stands at her window
with the dark night outside
This is the place
where sometimes she’d hide
Hide there in tears
that flooded young eyes
With all her dreams
at night she flies

She flies off to strange lands
that are so far away
Dreams of a prince
she’ll marry someday
All of those dreams
filling her head
Follow her closely
into her bed

Then in the morning
with the sun on the rise
She wipes all the tears
away from sad eyes

Down in the kitchen
she hears mother singing
Off in the distance
church bells are ringing
She helps out her Mom
helps out her Dad
But here in the morning
she’s still feeling sad

She does not know
nor can she say
What happens to dreams
when they go away
She sits and she stares
at the long day ahead
All she can think
is to crawl back to bed

Depression, Depression
won’t you run far from here
Leave her here laughing
take all her fear
Depression, Depression
won’t you leave her alone
Before her young heart
turns colder than stone

If you see young Mary
out by the garden gate
Try to find some empathy
before it’s all too late
Nod your head, say hello
or give a little wink
Let her know someone cares
and maybe she will think

Maybe she will think
life is not as bad as it seems
Lift her head up high
forget her lonely dreams
Maybe she will leave one day
walk proudly down the street
I hopes she meets a Prince
who sweeps her off her feet

Tells her that he loves her
how life can be so grand
Maybe down the road aways
he even hold her hand
Never more to leave her
for she is such a pearl
That brightens up the day
brightens up the world

Evelynn

Amber Diaz-Faria

Evelynn sat across me: she directed herself away, feet pointed diagonally, and her frail arms crossed her bosom— a sort of security cocoon. Between us was a quiet violence— a scream echoing from moments before. It was a feeling I’d caused, and the air punished us for being nothing and everything all at once.

Just beyond Evelynn were the dwindling rays of the sun in the open window. We had an unspoken agreement to let the room darken. The air was so heavy that neither one of us could stand to switch a light. The shadows of the upcoming evening lengthened between us, and Evelynn’s flickering eyelashes became unseen.

There was a silkiness in the nook of her neck where I’d kissed her many times before, and I could also see the innuendo before Evelynn’s lips parted: rising from her belly tangling itself in her throat, imposing past the gulps onto her thick tongue where it now rested, and waiting to lash out at me. Sex and companionship, I braced myself to never lose it. It was then that she spoke a whisper of words that knifed themselves to me through the dark, grew sultry legs, and filled me in the places where Evelynn should have been.

I thought about stroking her neck, making it all start over again, turning turmoil into pleasure. I thought I could make her forgive me sooner rather than later, toying with her emotions so she’d have me. Deep in the darkness were the soft gulps of her tears. She was crying. So, I regurgitated the words that had made everything alright before: I said it’d all been too hard, so hard—keeping the coolness in my voice; if only she could understand the late days at the office, the constant yelling that goes on with those guys at work, wearing a tie all the time, sweating under a dress jacket; the way my socks smelled at the end of the day… Then the woman at the office who smiled a little too long, visited my desk, but every moment…flicked her pillow lips my way. I didn’t love her, and I loved Evelynn. It was meaningful and everything I wanted to say.

Evelynn wouldn’t allow me to say a thing more. She harnessed the silence, and I waited for forgiveness. She asked me if I loved her. She desired only reassurance. I said I loved her. We sat through the night. I’d given Evelynn the satisfaction of believing in her power, bidding her patiently —conspiratorially

— and pretending like I didn’t know how this would end. When the sun rose upon us, I could sense her faltering, thinking about the children, the neighborhood gossip, and the societal perceptions of single motherhood. And the gap closed. Morning sounds were in our ears while we fondled each other. Evelynn’s lips were flushed, bright upon her tender face, and her tears were wet against my cheek as her body pressed against mine. The bedding was our escape from ourselves—a vacation, as you will.

The Plunge of a Lily Pad

D.S. Burton

That morning at the garden pond, the name of which I never knew, I observed the most peculiar sight.  

I was gathering my peace and taking notes at the serenity stones, which were warmed by the benevolent sun rays that blanketed over the hilltop. I was a student then, and I still remember the pleasant plant smells that wafted from waters dotted with lazy-bellied lily pads–as the garden  pond was–like fresh rain and vegetation. Even more so do I remember the abrupt and astonishing altercation that broke out on the bank.  

At first, I could not believe my eyes. I rose from the stones and held my notebook to my chest. Across the pond, on the edge of the water where a large blossom-growing lily was afloat, were two frogs that had seemingly entered a skirmish. The first frog, who was big and pale yellow with eyes like crosses, screeched at an unearthly high pitch that I could only assume was a battle cry. The other frog, a round little spotted greenie with a vocal sac I had earlier seen inflate like a latex balloon, was looking at the first with hatred. The two frogs were at a stalemate only briefly, until the yellow could no longer stand the smug facade of the green and lunged at him with balled limbs. 

I immediately felt the urge to laugh at the absurdity of the event, though as they grappled over each other and redoubled from leaps and swings like old-timey fisticuffs, I saw the violence that ensued. At once, my face grew pale and my mouth fell agape, in shock and confusion. The frogs tumbled onto the grass, slamming into the ground with the force of a hurled stone. It was clear from their way of fighting that the yellow frog had been the initiator of the engagement, for what I was entirely unaware. It could have been over a lily pad, with the perfect  position to the warmth of the sun. Or perhaps the green frog provoked him by pronouncing his mating call. Regardless of reason or reward, the yellow pounced with furious vigour and the green dodged and struck back in defence of his life. 

The stillness of the tranquil garden only drew the brutality to new heights. The grass was ruffled around them, and the floating lilies suddenly felt to me like leafy corpses bobbing in the pond. The green frog was agile, though the yellow seemed to follow him everywhere he’d go, already blocking the path. When the yellow frog caught him mid-jump, trying to flee, he bumped him backward like sumo to the stone overlooking the water, where he gripped onto the little green who was sprawled on his back, flinging his legs about, as though in an attempt to strangle him. The aggressor seized the little frog’s neck with such precision that, if he were human and not an amphibian, he very well might have held his head underwater until he drowned.  

I knew I should have intervened. I should have run across the lawn and kicked them from each other, and to this day I imagine what may have happened if I did, but I was petrified and disgusted by the rage such a small being could possess, and feared if I approached any nearer,  the two may lunge onto me and I didn’t know if I could handle the coldness and sliminess and harassment. It’s pathetic, I know. My feet were like cement blocks, my hands dug into the spine and pages on either side of my book, my arms crossed in a dead man’s position. By the time I had even fully comprehended what was happening and the possibilities as to why, the assault was over. It lasted perhaps two minutes.  

The little frog had squirmed its way out of the yellow’s death hold, prying free of his slimy hands and wrapping his legs around the yellow one’s neck. What a slippery frog! And how fat and grotesque was the yellow frog’s neck that he could not reach the little green where he was wrapped! The yellow rocked and struggled, trying to screech, to inflate its own neck, but the green held him too tight; there were no sounds to be made, not after one declared a battle and so poorly lost. I can only imagine that the aggressor had all the air in his lungs strangled out of him, as I watched the little green slap his hands onto his neck as well. The yellow frog cried one last high whistle before he went limp, and the green frog pushed him over the edge of the bank. The pond erupted in a vast splash that disrupted the lilies for some distance and dragged one down into the depths of the garden pond.  

When I hurried to the bank, where the water rippled and lilies swayed like rowboats, the little green frog had already hopped off, likely toward some other garden where he hoped to find quietude. The yellow frog had fallen atop the lily pad at the end of the pond, which collapsed inward like a net and plunged into the water with the body of the frog. I gazed down into the water after them.  

It was a slow descent, the water cutting down around the mass like the swoosh of a katana blade. The frog was still and dull under the surface of the early morning pond, sinking like a thoughtless stone tossed by a bored man. The frog was soon enveloped in the lily pad, which covered its vicious hands and eventually obscured it completely in waves of the fluttering plant. The downward stream of water was entirely without bubbles.  

Where could the point have been in such a fate? What possessed the fool to think in such  a way? The frog’s face, the last I ever saw of it, was white and open-mouthed. With the lily pad gone, the others in the pond were no longer relaxing but drab and meaningless. That beautiful lily pad, blooming a bright pink lotus with countless intricate petals reaching for the heavens, was now plummeting into the dark. The lotus flattened and drowned at once, small torn pieces of petals drifting upward amidst the current of rushing water, like a vortex around the fall, where they eventually surfaced like little dead fish on the pond. I imagined the pink of the flower stained onto the frog’s back, leaving its mark for eternity. I watched as the frog and the lily pad it was engulfed in sank like in a Lotus Pond, to the lower depths of Hell.  

When the frog and the lily had disappeared, fading into the unknown abyss, there was a reflection on the pond. My own face stared back at me, perplexed and disturbed, and that image of myself was seared forever into my memory. 

# 

Some fifteen years later, I stood as an accomplished prosecutor in the XX High Court. I had completed my studies and found another garden, slightly further from the university, to ease my mind over the years from the legal processes in which I was otherwise swamped.  

That day, I prosecuted a case against an arsonist and assaulter who, fortunately, was incompetent enough to fail in killing my client despite the second attempt. I was dressed in the most formal of attire, and the windowless courtroom was stifling in the mid-summer heat. I felt my neck swelter, from which sweat dripped and cupped in the cuff of my tie.  

My client sat beside me with a black eye and burn wounds on his arms and neck. I could only imagine the discomfort of my client in a suit and tie, despite the redness of his neck and upper back; how the clothing would rub and sting. In fact, I told him outside, before the court was in session, to take off his ridiculous costume and enter instead in just a shirt. I then added he would be better off going to some shop and returning in a floral vacation shirt and a pair of oversized glasses; the situation was so ludicrous.  

As the proceedings began, I was in utter disbelief that we were even sitting in the courtroom. How could the case have gone to trial? Even if the scoundrel hadn’t started the fire, how could he try to twist the blatant assault that occurred on the street thereafter? There was  even a witness–albeit an old crone of a neighbour who disliked my client–but if she could speak even a word of doubt towards the man’s guilt, I would know at once she had been bribed or influenced by the defendant. I expected the court to be adjourned within the hour.  

The defence attorney, a miserable-faced man who probably spent his life lying for criminals, began to present the events as he wished them to be seen. I was dumbfounded and caught completely off guard as he produced word after word of what were the most absurd falsifications I had ever heard. My eyes grew wide, and my head spun as I tried to discern whether I had been hearing him wrong or if he was truly making such egregious claims and justifications. It was when he suggested my client (listen to this) had wrongfully accused the defendant of setting fire to his home, and then attacked him out of hatred, that I was overcome by an inappropriate urge to laugh; and yet it was the only thing I could think to do.  

It was that same urge I had at the garden pond those years ago, but this time I succumbed to the laughter. I couldn’t help myself! I simply couldn’t take it any longer. I burst out laughing, my fists clenched on the table, and I had to restrain myself from bashing my head against it,  again and again, or crumpling the papers before me. How was it that we, as humans, think ourselves so superior to other beings? How humans dare to talk when they intend to deceive, or act when they commit injustice, was beyond me! The absurdity of humans! The absurdity of nature! We are no better than the frogs on the garden bank who strangled each other for mating and sitting on lilies. And it is harder for a man to commit a crime than a frog, or any amphibian… or any beast for that matter! Why, our only advantage is that our hands are not slippery! And yet, we still do it and dare to speak and to act and to stand before others. The absurdity of it all!

I wanted to cry, “You yellow frog! You yellow frog!”, but I suppressed the words, for then the claims I had gone mad would be too difficult to defend. In my twelve years as a prosecutor, and my nearly twenty years in law, there was something that bothered me profoundly about other human beings, and I guessed that was why I took up the profession. But I had never realised until then the exact mirror, like the reflection of my very face over the depths of that glistening pond, between the altercation on the bank and human society. I guffawed as I realised the similarities didn’t end at the man and the frog’s injustices. As awful as I had found the death of that frog, and how viscerally I could picture its pale, sinking corpse, wrapped in the ruins of beauty, I knew then the justice the defendant would be served would be as dark as that yellow frog. I couldn’t help it, I swear, when I pointed and laughed at the defendant, who peered at me queerly from beside his attorney, as though deeply concerned. I spoke to myself for several minutes, which I realised only later; the absurdity had nearly brought me to tears.  

Finally, all eyes in the room glaring at me, disturbed, I settled myself down and suppressed my laughter. I shook the hand of my client, feeling the greatest clarity I had ever had.  Sighing and shaking my head, I attempted to get the affairs back in order. Though it took a  number of minutes to explain to the court that my mutterings of a lily pad were nothing…

The Media Bus

 Elaine McCluskey

Chad had a lifelong habit of not listening, which is why it had taken him thirty minutes to locate  Vic and Marion’s bungalow. “Any problem finding us?” asked Vic, answering the door in a Greek  fisherman’s hat. “Easy peasey,” replied Chad, who also had a habit of lying. Chad lied so easily,  so regularly, that he did not know he was lying. After telling countless people that he was a  championship swimmer, Chad jumped off a moving catamaran and almost drowned. 

“Come in, come in,” said Vic, a craggy relic of a man. “Marion will be tickled to see you.  A lot of excitement, you know, with—in a hushed reverential tone—The Book.”  “Ahhh,” said Chad. “The Book.”  

The bungalow was dimly lit with wall-to-wall carpeting and a distinct seventies feel.  Chad could imagine a brass room divider and a pair of Blue Mountain dolphins. He handed Vic a  cream-colored business card with gold lettering: Chad Powers APR, Award Winning Public  Relations Executive. 

“We’ll be conducting business in the den,” explained Vic, ignoring Chad’s card. “The  author is waiting.”  

Chad had worn his work uniform: a dark blazer and an open-necked blue shirt that  played up his eyes. He was there as a favour. Vic was his wife’s uncle, although Chad barely  knew him. The older couple had always lived in another province. 

Vic was agile for ninety-one, Chad allowed as they headed to the den. Vic was going for  a rugged, nautical look, wearing, in addition to the Greek fisherman’s hat, an L.L. Bean ragg wool sweater. In the den were navigational charts and prints of aristocratic schooners, all  meant to legitimize Vic’s faux nautical look. 

Vic and Marion had worked in television, Marion as an on-air, name personality and Vic as a producer. This was essential knowledge. 

“Did you know,” Vic asked, “that Marion was the first host of It’s About Time?” “Oh boy.” Chad acted impressed. “That is amazing.” 

Vic was making it clear, despite his Old Man and the Sea vibe, that Marion was the Star.  And Chad was not. 

Marion had self-published a slim biography of Nova Scotia giantess Anna Swan, who died in 1888. Most of the material was cribbed from earlier books. The story of Anna Swan, who stood an astonishing seven foot eleven and married another giant, had been taught in  schools for years. The couple lived, for a time, an exceptional life in the circus, meeting royalty, close friends with Tom Thumb and his wife Lavinia, before tragedy struck. Two babies died and  then Anna. 

Chad’s wife Denise had briefed him on The Book when she gave him directions to Vic’s house in Moncton. But Chad had not been listening. He had no idea what the book was about. He suspected it had something to do with birds, none of which he cared for. He had once been attacked by a violent, territorial crow. Crows, it is said, can recognize faces and this one hated  Chad’s. 

“So yes,” Chad said, returning to the book, “birds are very au courant.” 

Vic gave Chad a confused old-man stare, which was hard to distinguish from his regular  old-man stare. While Vic was staring, Chad checked his phone, which had, as its ringtone, Don’t  Worry Be Happy. He especially liked the whistling parts. 

Denise suspected that her husband’s listening problem was due to hearing loss. Years of  playing Rammstein, a German industrial goth metal band, at maximum volume could do that.  Chad’s past employers—too numerous to name—believed he suffered from arrogance and/or  laziness. One Halloween Chad went as Will Ferrell’s anchorman, and people said, “You ARE Ron  Burgundy.” Chad laughed, convinced he looked like the debonair Hugh Jackman, instead of  Ferrell, who often played buffoons.  

Marion, who had once been a beauty, was waiting in the den. She was wearing dark  glasses, an ash-blonde wig, and a taupe slacks ensemble. Marion carried no extra weight. In one  manicured hand she held a mug. 

“Marion’s name alone will sell the book,” boasted Vic. 

No one under the age of eighty has ever heard of Marion, thought Chad, sensing an  uncomfortable Sunset Boulevard vibe with Vic preparing his once-famous wife for her closeup,  except there was no staircase and the faded beauty was not moving. And then, Marion took a  gulp from the mug. 

Vic was stage-managing the visit. They relocated to the living room. Vic left and came  back with coffee and Peek Freans cookies. He produced a barrage of papers illustrated with Clip  Art. The book, he said, was at the printer. 

“So,” asked Vic. “You will MC the launch?”

Chad had not been listening when Vic said it would be held at the Anna Swan Museum  in Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia. 

“Oh yes.” 

“Happy you agreed to do this.” 

“Not at all,” said Chad. “It will be an event, Vic.” 

“So Tatamagouche is two hours from Moncton…” 

Tatamagouche. Chad heard the word for the first time. 

“We are planning a media bus,” announced Vic as Chad’s eyes widened. “Do you think?” asked Chad. 

“Oh yes,” said Vic. 

Marion was very keen on the idea of the media bus, Vic explained. She was expecting national TV reporters, the premier, and, of course, The Globe and Mail. The odds of getting a  single reporter to Marion’s launch were zero, Chad knew. A media bus was unmitigated  madness. 

Chad went to the kitchen for a glass of water. He saw tea towels with prints of grapes.  Kitschy signs. Home is where the wine is. Two boxes of Kirkland wine from Costco. When Chad returned, Marion was slumped to one side, the wine mug drained. 

*** 

On his way home, Chad stopped in at a bar frequented by communications people. He needed  to decompress. He saw someone he recognized: Joyce, who had been there for a while. Joyce  was in her sixties, single, and employed by a government department that had once fired Chad.

Joyce’s one passion in life was attending Rolling Stones concerts: thirty at last count.  Most recently in Madrid. Joyce planned her vacations around the band’s tour schedule. She  knew that Chad was a diehard Rammstein fan, and while the dark, lederhosen-wearing shock  band was not her cup of tea, she admired Chad’s devotion. Rammstein, which had been  accused of promoting the Master Race and was indirectly linked to the Columbine shootings. 

Joyce told Chad that the supervisor who fired him was on stress leave. The fourth time in two years. 

“That asshole has nothing in his life,” said Joyce. 

“Exactly,” said Chad. 

“He told me that, as a child, he was too poor to enjoy music,” wheezed Joyce. “That was  for ‘advantaged’ people who could buy albums and stereo equipment. Those people had a bedroom where they could play Pink Floyd or April Wine. He slept on the couch. But he could go to the library. That was free. He could bring home Dickens and Dostoevsky, and all he needed was a flashlight to read by when his father staggered home drunk. And the whole story  was bullshit. None of us had anything back then. He was just trying to make himself sound special.” 

“You are right,” said Chad, who had barely heard a word. 

“He’s as special as an outbreak of lice.” 

“Exactly.” 

If you asked Chad why he did not listen, he could not tell you. He would insist that there had been traffic noise or that the person was not speaking clearly. This issue—whatever it  was—had nothing to do with him.

*** 

By the time Chad returned home, Denise was unsettled. Vic, it turns out, had phoned her father and complained about Chad, who was, in Vic’s words “all wet.” 

“He said you didn’t understand the importance of the media bus.” 

“That man is a menace,” responded Chad, already envisaging his next career move.  “And I am a senior communications executive with thirty years in the business.” “Of course,” replied Denise, not mentioning that Chad had been fired five times. “He also said you were ‘all hopped up.’” 

“What does that even mean?” Chad asked. 

“I don’t know.” 

Denise was a Pilates instructor. After raising two lovely children, she had taken up meditation. Denise had met Chad when he was working in radio—he was nineteen; she two years younger. Chad had been doing a remote from a supermarket where Denise was a part time cashier. It was, as the cliché goes, love at first sight. 

A month ago, Denise posted a Tik Tok video celebrating their story. It contained photos of them through the decades—Us at 19 and 17, Us at 45 and 43, Us at 57 and 55—all to the  tune of Ed Sheeran’s We Were Just Kids When We Fell In Love. The video was part of a Tik Tok fad, which jumped the shark when a Tennessee couple said they started dating at the age of eight. 

Denise had one boyfriend before Chad, but the relationship was short-lived. His name was Dirl, which Chad found infinitely amusing. “I told you before,” Denise had explained. “Dirl was named after his maternal grandfather Dirl. He did not choose to be named Dirl.”

“I see. So if your grandfather was named Beelzebub, would you go with that? Or Bilé, the Celtic god of Hell?” Chad had replied, feeling clever. 

“I don’t know where you are going with this.” 

“I am not going anywhere.” 

“Exactly.” 

And then they laughed. Smug in their we were just kids when we fell in love story. Chad had two hobbies besides Rammstein. Collecting vintage microphones and racing remote-controlled boats. At this moment, he felt an overwhelming urge to buy a miniature boat with a great white shark motif. 

Chad was still waiting for the right time to tell Denise that he had been “laid off.” Denise was planning a getaway for their anniversary. 

Every time Chad got in trouble, he was stunned. In Chad’s mind, it was as though he was  in a long-running soap opera, and someone had decided, without telling him, to change the  plot. Chad, who had played a well-liked funeral director, was being made into a villain because the audience needed a surprise. Someone decided Chad should now be a secret murderer. That is how he saw it. 

 *** 

The next day, when Chad was trying to figure out how to break the news to Denise, he received a text from a person he had not seen in decades. A person he believed was working on international cruise ships. 

I am coming through town. How about coffee? 

“Who is this person?” Denise asked while Chad typed a reply.

“Just an old friend.” 

“How come I have never heard of her?” 

“It was decades ago. It hardly matters.” 

“Well, you know about all my old friends. You even know about Dirl.” 

“That is different. Dirl was a boyfriend. Dirl has a stupid name. Dirl became a forest ranger, which I have trouble believing.” 

“Why? Why do you have trouble with Dirl being a forest ranger?” 

“Think about it.” 

On the Google map of life, Chad lived midway between Denial and Duplicity, and he was good there. In that location, Chad was able to maintain a cheerfulness, an optimism, that most people would envy. When Rammstein’s singer was accused of a sex crime, German fans preached  the importance of Unschuldsvermutung, the presumption of innocence. Shouldn’t that apply to  everyone? Chad asked himself. 

Denise looked up the stranger online—her name was Bonnie van der Boor. She appeared older. Retired. All her Facebook posts consisted of hackneyed phrases. “He has a face that only a mother could love.” “You’re wet behind the ears.” And the disturbingly creepy “Let me see those puppies.”  

Worst than that: Bonnie was a loudmouth. A chronic complainer. Bonnie complained about everything. Unleashed cats. Schoolchildren who ran by her house shrieking. The pharmacy clerk who asked for her seniors discount card. 

Denise rarely griped about anything, and she was unfailingly polite to service people.

***

Fired. 

The word sounded shameful. Deplorable. 

When he had done nothing wrong. 

One minor typo. Albeit the client’s name. Loser instead of Losier. 

It was not as if he had sexually harassed a co-worker, or used a racial slur, or posted a photo of a prominent defence attorney and misidentified him as the worst mass murderer in Canadian history (which he had done once). 

When Chad worked for a national company, he sent a confidential email to the  president during contract talks and accidentally copied all 10,000 employees. At a reception for federal dignitaries, Chad told an underling that one minister “had been hit by the stupid stick,”  not realizing the minister was behind him. 

Chad did not like lying to Denise, but maybe, if the truth be told, lying worked for Chad. When he met Denise, he told her that his mother was a saint who made the best birthday cakes ever. He swore that Denise was his first girlfriend. Chad lied to create a better back story; he lied so that people would not get mad at him. 

 *** 

That night, Denise took a call. “Oh no. That is terrible,” Chad heard her say. “What?” Chad asked. 

“It is Vic.” 

Vic, whom Chad had called “a backstabbing buzzard,” had done something bad. During a tense discussion, the former TV producer had produced a vintage military pistol, and Marion had phoned the police. 

Chad was delighted. 

Earlier that day, Marion had gone to her doctor, and afterwards Vic, frustrated with his own cognitive struggles, demanded: “Did you ask for a memory test?” 

“No,” replied Marion, “I forgot.” 

An argument ensued, nerves frayed by the looming launch. Vic insisted that he was only cleaning the unloaded gun; the officer gave him a warning. 

“I told you he was a menace,” said Chad. 

“Yes, you did,” allowed Denise. 

“All that business about a media bus. Madness.” 

“They were never right together,” sighed Denise. “Vic and Marion. Even though they did everything as a team, they were never right. Not like us.” 

Before Vic, Marion had been involved with a dashing news reader, a chain-smoking Brit with good hair and a booming voice. A charmer doused in cologne. And then, because the rogue was married, Marion settled for Vic. Vic forever relegated to the role of second best. No matter how hard he tried.  

Theodore Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” But in this case, the opposite was true. Chad was happy to compare himself to the craggy faced buzzard named Vic. Chad had never, despite his every failing, his every colossal screw up, been Denise’s second best. This was his unaccountable break. Like being able to count cards or draw horses so real that you wanted to touch them. 

Denise was his soul mate. The person who dazzled him in the dairy aisle of a grocery store in Lethbridge, Alberta, two weeks after he left his first wife, Bonnie, who led him down a one-way street of drugs, wild sex, and death-metal music. Divorced at nineteen, he was. After a  while, Chad convinced himself that the disastrous marriage had never happened. In the same way he convinced himself he could competitively swim. And that his mother really did love him, his mother who left him with a mean-spirited aunt when he was three and picked him up ten years later.  

“I told that person I can’t go for coffee,” said Chad, as though he had fixed everything.  Birthdays. The client’s misspelled name. “Too busy at work.” 

“Makes sense,” said Denise. “What could you possibly have to talk about?” “Exactly.”

Nothing in this World

Kerri Cull

1 Year

She closed the door to the walk-in closet and slid down the wall to sit cross-legged on the walnut-coloured hardwood floor, waiting for her doctor to call. She had turned on the fan in the ensuite bathroom, so her parents, who were looking after her son downstairs, wouldn’t hear her talking. They wouldn’t understand.

The intrusive thoughts increased in January. Around the same time, her dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and her mom was hospitalized for an unknown infection. They came and went quickly like a photo being plunged into view, close up, graphic, and disturbing. Her son’s ten-pound body roasted and glistening like a turkey on a plate. Surrounded by strangers with forks, his head inside the mouth of a snake, being catapulted into the Atlantic Ocean by some stranger’s foot, hanging from her dining room chandelier in his white sleeper, being shaken by a lion the way a dog shakes a toy. She, standing there, useless, frozen, catatonic.

She thought back to the first time it happened. Was it three months after he was born? Six months? He was nearing a year, and all she knew was that while he slept in the crib down the hallway, all she could think about was when he was going to die. She would have to check on him every fifteen minutes to make sure he was breathing, to take his temp, to check his breathing, to take his temp, to check his breathing.

Sleep deprivation can really mess you up.

She kept the doctor’s words top of her mind when trying to go about her days. ‘I’m only having these feelings due to sleep exhaustion. I am not crazy. I am not a horrible person. I am not going to kill my son. My son is not going to die.’

A few weeks later, she met her friend for brunch downtown at a hip but classic restaurant named after a colour.

‘You are glowing.’

‘I’m having really intrusive thoughts.’

Her friend went into counsellor mode, eyes narrowing, posture shifting, breath even.

‘What kind of thoughts?’

She listed as many as she could stomach. Blurted them out as if she was admitting to having an affair or maxing out her credit card. Shameful. Fearful.

‘They’re only thoughts, only energy. They only have power if you give them power. Let them move through you.’

3 Years

Her parents were visiting again. They were consumed by their grandson in a way she couldn’t yet understand. Her mom admitting that a meme she saw recently was true: that grandparents love their grandkids more than their children.

His knuckles looked like dimples. His enormous brown eyes were the stuff of cliches and movies because she could get lost in them. They did look like milk chocolate.

When she was lying down with him at night, he told her about his day, making sense and no sense at the same time. Pretending he was asleep, snoring, eyes wide open.

‘You’re not asleep, bud, your eyes are open.‘

‘I’m attending.’’

‘You’re pretending, are you? Ok.’

She pretended to fall asleep. He slowly lifted his head off his pillow and started kissing her face. She kept her eyes closed for as long as she could. His little puckers leaving tiny wet tracks. He laughed like it was the funniest thing ever, threw his head back on the pillow, and the game started over. She sang him the song about tractors.

His favourite breakfasts were cheese omelettes, French toast, and pancakes. She would sit with him at his little grey table in the living room, and they would watch Sesame Street, dance to the Number of the Day song, count with The Count, stomp their feet, little circles of syrup or ketchup falling and sticking to the hardwood floor.

She would take a picture of him every morning before he went to daycare, just in case he died. Then she would go to work. Throughout the day, he rose in her mind and she had to remind herself to breathe. Did he need her? Was he in trouble? She would check her phone to see if she missed any calls.

9 Years

They were visiting a friend who just moved into a three-storey home in an established cul-de-sac in an old subdivision. There was a foyer. The staircase was the stuff of a childhood movie. He played with the toddler.

‘I never knew there would be so much fear in motherhood. Toby is only two and I am so nervous all the time.’

‘It doesn’t really end. What you worry about only changes.’

‘I guess everyone goes through it, and everyone seems to survive.’

Her son was now climbing the stairs and sliding down the rail facedown. The highest drop would be about 12 feet. She kept her mouth shut. He did not fall. He almost fell. He didn’t. The floor was ceramic tile. Unforgiving.

13 Years

She finally learned to fold a fitted sheet. She was 47 years old. Her linen closet was always made of various layers and colours of fabrics folded in a few different ways. The towels were multicoloured, some rolled, some folded. Face cloths folded into smaller squares. Bedsheets semi-folded but with curved edges and soft lines. Everything wrinkly. No corners.

Her mother would be proud. The linen closet looked like an adult owned it. Each towel, cloth, sheet, and pillow case folded the same way like envelopes. Stacked, sharp, tidy.

She vacuumed the main floor every day.

There were no dirty dishes allowed in the sink at the end of the day. Nothing in the drying rack. Everything was either in the dishwasher or clean and put away in a cupboard or drawer. Her after-supper routine never faltered. All pots, pans, cutting boards, spatulas, forks, and glasses were washed and put away within 30 minutes of the meal being finished. Surfaces wiped, condiments returned to the fridge. Floor swept.

She prepped the coffee machine every night. Refilled the beans, topped up the water, and filled up the kettle in case anyone wanted tea. No one ever wanted tea.

They never ran out of milk, eggs, butter, or cheese.

She did one load of laundry daily, and she had been doing it for over 13 years.

When her husband would leave things on the dining room table—book, mail, coupon, anything really—she would ask him, ‘where does this go?’ and he would find it a home.

She kept a box in the corner of the porch for donations. Every month she threw stuff away: toys her son had aged out of, bad books, ill-fitting clothing, useless dishes, old T-shirts.

She kept lists and counted things: goals for the year, travel destinations, new recipes, books to read, ideas for articles she would never write, projects to do someday (learn ASL, research family tree, walk all the streets in the city).

She had lost 15 pounds.
She was proud.

17 Years

He was graduating. She went with him when he picked out his suit, tried her best not to say too much about any style or colour. Her role was to swipe the credit card, and she was happy to be included.

His once white, blond hair was now dark brown and thick. He wore it swathed to the right and it would sometimes hang slightly down in his face. He would peer out from under it, brows furrowed. She would catch glimpses of him with his friends and be privy to a side she hadn’t seen in a long time, years maybe. Such is the relationship between parents and teenagers who are carefree in the camaraderie of friendship but not much else.

At the cap and gown, she watched the back of his head from sixteen rows back. He was tall for his age. His head was a good foot above some others around him. Was he nervous to walk across the stage in this auditorium? He was ungodly shy when he was young. He would turn his back to people. Not even strangers, but family friends, just at the sheer sight of them in his space. Eyes averted. Holding on tight to her or her husband. His legs wrapped around their hips like they were life rafts. He once told her that he was scared of people. He was three. He was always an introvert. That, she knew, would never change.
As the emcee got to the Cs, she noticed him shifting in his chair. He took off his cap, fingered his hair back, and re-positioned it. When he started to walk to the stage, he kept his eyes down. He was nervous. She could hear her pulse in her ears. Her palms felt wet. She put her hand on her husband’s leg, and he placed his hand on top of hers.

When they called his name and he took the diploma in his hand, he turned to look out at the crowd and found his parents there. They were smiling. His mom was taking pictures and had a tissue in her left hand. His father was giving him a thumbs-up.

When they called his name and he took the diploma in his hand, she took out her phone and zoomed in. He looked proud and tall. Like a man in the world. Like a man. An image galloped through her mind. A machete swinging down out of nowhere and slicing clean through his neck. His head fell to the floor.

She smiled and wiped her tears. There was nothing in this world she loved more.

Bear The Pall

Tena Laing

Is a ghost story best told by the ghost, or by the one she haunts? Her host. I am the ghost. This is my host, Jim.

I wish I could say he’s the host with the most, but he’s rather skint at the moment, I’m afraid. Hasn’t had a paying job in years. 

Look at Jim, serious and sober, tightening his tie around his thinning neck – black tie, of course – like every other day. You’d think he could come up with something a little brighter before he is called to ‘bear the pall’, instead of just casting one, as they say.  

He’d like to think I’m just in his head. He’d like to believe that. He’d love to go back to the time before he knew I’m not. But that’s not how these things work.  

Craig’s List Classified: Casket, never buried, good value 

Jim’s thin hand trembles a little as he answers his phone. He knows from experience, if he doesn’t answer it, if he tries to turn it off, there will be a deluge of text messages and pings and notifications that no attempt to power down will have any effect on. His wife will come running. It will be worse. So, he accepts the call.  

“You have a like-new casket for sale?” 

“No, no, I don’t.”

“Was there a body in it? Was it used at all? The ad doesn’t make that totally clear.”

“Actually, there’s no casket.” 

“Is this 867-5309?” 

“Yes, Ma’am. But the casket is long gone, I’m afraid.” 

“Then you should stop wasting people’s time and pull the ad!” Her voice moves from  disappointment to sharpness.  

“I will see what I can do about that,” Jim says low and slow, knowing there’s nothing he can do. 

Sara, Jim’s wife, hands him his morning espresso and a small card, already opened. “This was waiting on the doorstep.” She looks at him expectantly. 

He downs his coffee in one blistering sip then looks down at the card, his forehead creasing.

Dear Jim,

Please accept our sincere gratitude for serving as Alice Blood’s pallbearer.  It was such a comfort in our time of need to know we could depend on you. The Blood Family 

“We don’t know any Bloods,” Sara says, shaking her head, confused.

“No, Sara. No we don’t.” Jim shrugs his shoulders in resignation. He won’t begin to cross the divide that exists between them by explaining any of this – because really, who would believe him? Sara still thinks he gets dressed and goes to work every day.  

A younger Jim wouldn’t have told Sara the truth either, but oh, they’d had fun together then. Lived in a colour-saturated, cash-soaked world he thought he controlled. 

Whether it’s Stairway to Heaven or Highway to Hell, we’ve got you covered. 

From the cushy desk of his hospital administration office, Jim had lucked into the best gig imaginable for a man of few skills. He liaised with patients’ families and funeral homes. The first time we met, he’d taken my hand then pressed it between his two large ones with a direct, even warm, smile.  

“They’ve asked me to connect with a… funeral home,” my voice had faltered, “because he can’t last more than a day or two. It’s going to happen any day now.” I was far from home in a country where I knew no one. 

“Let me handle that for you.” Jim had held my hand with just the right amount of time and pressure to seem trustworthy, but this was not something I was willing to outsource. 

“Are there any that the hospital recommends? I’d prefer to contact them on my own.” 

His smile did not slip. “Of course. Perfectly understandable. Here is one we regularly  work with. They’re just on the next block. If you reach out to them, they will know what to do  when the morgue is ready to release the body.” 

He saw his mistake in my face instantly, as I listened to my husband being referred to as ‘the body’, then adjusted his sleeve to check what appeared to be a Rolex watch before continuing. “Forgive me. I misspoke. I get ahead of myself. They will know what to do and take care of everything should the need arise.” He lowered his head, penitent. 

I took the card he gave me and left his office to make the call. There was something in the tone of the woman who answered the phone at Decent Burials that was so off-putting. An oily and unlikely mixture of condescension and obsequiousness. And she pronounced Decent as though it were Descent Burials, and the slogan ‘where your loved ones rest in pieces’ must have been mistranslated. It was all wrong. When she asked me what my husband would be dressed in and what valuables and jewelry he might want with him in the top-of-the-line casket she was sure she could upsell me on, I froze.  

“I’ll have to get back to you. We’re not there yet.” 

“Look, I’m just here trying to help you prepare, hon, and respect the dearly departed,”  she’d replied, through her gum cracking. 

Instead of calling her back, I searched the internet, through welling eyes and found a well-reviewed option a little further from the hospital that didn’t make my skin crawl when I spoke to their representative. “We can definitely help you,” he said. “Just give the hospital our number and if our services are needed, you can rely on us.”  

Jim took their contact information from me with barely contained disdain.  “I went with the competition,” I acknowledged. 

“Your prerogative, of course.”

My beloved lingered near-death for two more days. I was sitting by his side, holding his hand, my head resting on his diminished thigh, when the time came. I clung to his hand which was still warm and pliant. Too soon, I was ushered out by kind nurses, so they could deal with the body. 

It was the middle of the night. I was dazed and distraught when I encountered Jim in the hallway.  

“The funeral home’s been called,” he said to me. “I’m so sorry for your loss. Would you  like to accompany me to the morgue to sign the release papers? I followed in a stupor.  

That this was not a normal hospital policy did not occur to me at 3:30 that morning. My limbs and brain grew increasingly numb as we descended into the bowels of the hospital and wound our way to the morgue. It was much less shiny than the upper donor-sponsored floors, and we waited in a wide corridor near a garage door. Attendants brought out a stretcher which held a dark body bag containing all that was left of my love. They pushed past us and out the  garage door to a waiting hearse. Another attendant had me sign some papers that I neither read nor understood. As soon as I was done, I unfroze in a panic. The word cremation had broken  through.  

“Wait!” I yelled, rushing out to the hearse before it could leave. They’d already loaded the body into the back and the doors were shut. “How do I know it’s him?” I shouted and banged on the driver’s window.  

He looked at me like I was a nuisance. An insect smashing into the windshield. I beat my fist on the hood of the vehicle. 

“Show me his face! I need to see his face! This will haunt me if I don’t!”  

He made to pull away, but the passenger door opened and the passenger got out and opened the back of the hearse for me. He jerked the body bag slightly towards us, and unzipped the top, which revealed first the jagged scar across my love’s scalp, endured after his unsuccessful brain surgery, and then his forehead, familiar and prominent, and his eyes, closed and bruised, and finally, his proud nose and full lips, already set in unfamiliar rigidity. I touched them once and stepped back, nodding. It was him. And of course, it wasn’t. What was him had already fled the scene. Still, they would be cremating the correct body. 

The passenger closed up the zipper, shut the door and nodding in return, got back in. 

As the hearse pulled away and turned right to exit the garage I saw the side panel for the first time: Decent in Style. 

Descent in Style – Go to Hell in the Right Handbasket 

It did not compute. That was the name of the funeral home I didn’t want. Had not called back.  

What the hell was happening? 

I made a beeline for the exit and ran like I was on fire. I had to get to that hearse. Why, how were the wrong people in possession of my husband’s body?  

I bolted towards the intersection and jumped in front of the hearse which was picking up speed as it moved onto the street. I saw the driver’s and passenger’s shocked faces, and somehow there was Jim in the back, leaning between them with a puzzled face to see what the disturbance was. I saw all this as I was launched up and over the top and back of the car. Normally, this type of collision – human and hearse – would attract a lot of attention, but we were alone in the pre dawn intersection when I landed awkwardly on my neck. The briefest flash of almost pain, and then nothing. Just thought – I will haunt you. I could hear the tires screech and crunch as they backed up over me to ensure the job was done, but I felt nothing apart from very chilled. 

Later, when I had lost the connection with my pulverized body, I watched it from somewhere above. They had me laid out on a grubby table in a basement. I regarded my face with a distant pity. No one I loved would see that face again. I watched as different attendants moved around my body and my husband’s, on a nearby table. They pulled the rings from our fingers, and a gold tooth from his cranked-open jaw. They removed my watch and necklace and earrings, estimating their resale value. They slipped my phone and wallet out of my pocket. They cut the tips of our index fingers off and argued over who should keep my shoes, which were designer.  

As I watched all this, I could see Jim through an open door. He was having a good old chinwag with someone in the hallway outside as he counted up a pile of cash, clearly in on what was happening, even though he wasn’t wrist deep in my entrails. The attendants by now had sliced into our abdomens and were removing our organs piece by piece. Next, they went for our brains. I could not discern their purpose, but they were handling our parts with some care. This  would have all been understandably unbearable except for the curious hazy distance I found  myself observing the gory works from.  

Instead of staying with our bodies, I found what seemed to be my self drifting toward Jim, and then against my will – I would have much rather searched for my husband’s self – I became tethered to Jim. 

Jim was a key partner in a corrupt and greedy perversion of the funeral process and denied my beloved and me our natural end-of-life ceremonies. Since he, in fact, was responsible in large part for the taking of my life, I have turned his upside down. Leached the colour and variety from it as he did mine. All he can do now is spend his days at the local funeral parlour, where I compel him to be a volunteer pallbearer – a professional mourner, if you will. Every day he is there in his dark, sober clothes, singing dirges among the brokenhearted. Every day he watches as the lid to another coffin is lowered. And everyday it is my face he sees, every funeral mine.

The Norton

Kent Jones

I don’t feel I’ve missed a thing. At least nothing that mattered. Grandkids—I’d like to have grandkids. So far I’ve missed that. So I just contradicted myself.

In October last year I fell going up the steps to our front door—my second serious fall. I had another fall a year and a half earlier. I broke my wrist both times, collarbone first time and shoulder second. Previous falls/heavy lifting, etc. have made a mess of my back. My shoulder is shattered and it’s hard to use my left arm. These facts present a lot of challenges now. As insignificant as it may sound one of the most difficult things for me to face is the fact that I will never ride a motorcycle again.

Until recently I owned two motorcycles. One was a Harley Davidson Sportster that my wife Charlotte encouraged me to buy when I turned 50 back in 1999. We had been driving to Tobermory on the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario, where Charlotte’s family owned a cottage—a house really—on Lake Huron, and as we passed through the tiny community of Shallow Lake she asked me to stop in front of an old stone-clad shop. Virtually every building in Shallow Lake, Ontario is made of stone thanks to a local quarry that kept folks in Shallow Lake employed for decades.

It was a small building; I think it once was a butcher’s shop. But in 1999 it was Bob McKay’s Harley Davidson. We went inside.

There was some clothing and jewelry for sale, fancy chrome parts, an old juke box to add to the decor, a cat asleep in a rocking chair, and a total of two new Harley Davidsons on display. Those two bikes amounted to all the motorcycles that would fit in that little shop with the rest of the stuff they had for sale. Later I found out that Bob made his living building custom bikes in a large wooden building that resembled the Alamo out behind the shop, and shipping them all over North America, so selling ordinary factory-built bikes wasn’t a big passion for him, but the official association with Harley Davidson was useful. In fact the advertised price on the two bikes he had on display was precisely what Harley Davidson had listed for them on their website. Other Harley shops would add up to 40 per cent on top of that since they had no problem selling every Harley that was ever produced. His fair prices were noticed all over North America.

Anyway, one of the two bikes on display was a Harley Davidson Sportster—an 883—the basic Harley. And it was black. If you wanted one with a gas tank and fenders in a color other than black that would cost you 200 dollars more. Charlotte told me to climb on board, declared it looked perfect for me and, just like that, I became the owner of a Harley Davidson. I guess she figured it was the best alternative to any other mid-life crisis that may surface for a 50 year old art teacher.

It was fun for all of us—a little garden tractor of a Harley with an electric starter, and we all went places on it, with me driving of course. Cary and I circumnavigated Ohio, riding three hundred miles past corn fields, along rivers, over covered bridges, through little towns—one in southern Ohio that was holding its annual “Moonshine Festival”—to the magical archeological site of the Hopewell people known as Serpent Mound, and the Wright Patterson Air Force Museum in Dayton, headquarters of the US Air Force. We also toured Nova Scotia together on another occasion, doing our best to avoid the rain. One time Maggie sat in front of me and steered it when she was 12, while I still held the handlebars as we steamed along, “just in case.” And Charlotte and I took numerous trips around Newfoundland over the years just putting along at 55 miles per hour, winding through the mountains and through the forests.

The other motorcycle I owned was a 1972 Norton Commando. The model is called a “Fastback” due to it’s gas tank, seat, tail and handlebar configurations, and with some other basic accoutrements, it is the quintessential factory-built “café racer.” For over fifty years motorcycle manufacturers all over the world have been trying to replicate the looks, the sound and the handing of the Norton Commando. It was the fastest production motorcycle in the world when it was introduced and to this day it is still competitive in certain events thanks to its handling characteristics, effective and useful power range, and it’s dependability on a short racing circuit. In England they used to say you could ride it to work during the week and race it in Clubman events on the weekends. A Norton won the first Isle of Man TT race in 1907, and a hundred various TT events since then, and “placed” first, second and third over 400 times. A single cylinder Norton was the first to lap the Isle of Man at an average speed of over 100 miles per hour. In 1950 the company introduced the famous “Roadholder” front forks that revolutionized handling, and in one form or another, is still used by all motorcycle manufacturers to this day. The “Hogslayer”, a twin- engined Norton Commando, was the world’s fastest dragster in the 70’s and 80’s—engineered by amateur guys—not factories with hundreds of millions of dollars to invest.

I dreamed of owning a Norton from my teenage years onward. There was no Norton distributor near my hometown in Ohio but there was a BSA dealership, the rival to Triumph. Both of those British manufacturers must have agreed to stake out US territory because where one dealer was established the other was not to be found. Both companies produced cool bikes, the coolest being the Triumph Bonneville and the BSA Hornet and BSA Spitfire, but Nortons were something else—rare, exotic, legendary.

As the years went by, beginning in 1965, I always owned a motorcycle, the first
being a Ducati Diana when I was 16—a pretty cool bike, today worth a lot of money- –a 175 pound, 250 cc bike that was the fastest production bike in the world in that category at the time as well, and a racing legend.

As a university student in California I bought a 500 cc 1954 BSA “Iron Barrel,” a
road-going version of the famous BSA Gold Star, and eventually I bought a 650 BSA Lightning.

In my opinion, the feeling of freedom, of exhilaration, is simply unparalleled when riding a motorcycle and frankly, contributes to a motorcycle enthusiast’s
personality/character. It helps identify who they are. And “the brand” contributes further—from the original advertising slogan “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” to whatever the public thinks of the members of various “Biker Gangs.”

I found myself in England in 1972 as a post-graduate student in Visual Arts at The Slade School of Fine Art in London. I lived in North London—in Hornsey. When I headed for Central London and art school in the morning I often walked to Tottenham to catch the Underground at Turnpike Lane station.

Not far from the Underground station–on Green Lanes–was the motorcycle
dealership of Coburn and Hughes. And in their big picture window for over a year sat a fire-engine-red Norton Commando, beckoning to me like a Siren. God, I wanted to own that bike but secretly I hoped it would be sold and removed from that window since I couldn’t afford the price of 509 pounds, 50 pence that was clearly marked on a sign taped to the handlebars. I thought of that Norton daily.

Then I got a break. It came when I had my post-graduate exhibition at The Slade. I sold virtually every artwork I had made and I thought, “That’s it. I’m an art star.” Never mind that I didn’t sell another artwork for ten years—I earned over 500 pounds in one evening. So the next day I went straight down to Coburn and Hughes and bought the Norton.

I didn’t have enough additional funds to license it for the road or buy insurance so it sat in the front room of my flat in Hornsey for months before getting shipped to my parents’ home in Ohio. It stayed in the basement there until 1977 when I returned from New Guinea earlier than I had planned–my wife and I were running out of grant money that she had secured to send her, an anthropology student, and me, to Papua New Guinea for field research. In Ohio I bought a thoroughly-used 1970 Chevy Kingswood Estate station wagon for $270, removed the back seats, loaded everything I owned—including the Norton—in the back of it and headed off to California where a friend had promised me a job at New West Magazine in Beverly Hills. I left Ohio in December 1977, six hours ahead of the worst snow storm in history in the Midwest, drove 29 hours non-stop to Amarillo, Texas, where I was safe from the storm, which was moving east, stayed over night, and then drove 21 hours non-stop to Los Angeles where my friend Jeff Earhart had an apartment in Burbank.

And that’s where the Norton started life. I remember the day I first fired it up. Third kick and it sprang to life. I shifted it into first gear and slowly let out the clutch. I remember the feeling of exhilaration as it surged down the street and I remember thinking, “Damn, this thing is pretty fast” when I cranked the throttle back.

That motorcycle was my sole transportation during the several periods I lived and worked in Southern California. I would yo-yo back and forth between Britain and California, following my first wife, Debbora, a PhD student at Cambridge, then, after we split up, going wherever someone would employ me–different places in Britain and different places in California. Whenever I’d leave California, Jeff would store the bike for me in a garage with his Datsun rally car. When I’d return, Jeff’s employer, John Morton, a Scot who had raced Nortons in Europe in the 1950’s, would have mine tuned and ready to roll, and always with new Pirelli tires. And he wouldn’t take a penny for his effort. Hey, for him it was “a Norton.”

One year when I was hired to teach at the University of California at Santa Barbara, I arrived at Jeff’s from London on a Saturday morning, collected the Norton from John Morton’s shop and headed for Santa Barbara the next day, 120 miles north of Burbank.

As I cruised along near Ventura, with orange groves flanking me on both sides of the freeway, I didn’t notice I was running at around a hundred miles an hour, it was so smooth. The Norton hummed along with its throaty note, the huge sprinklers in the orange groves were producing their percussive chunk-chunk-chunk noises, and the orange blossoms mingled with the smell of high octane gasoline and the Pacific Ocean. That’s when the Highway Patrol guy got me–pulled me over and handed me a ticket for speeding. A “hundred” in a “seventy.” I tried to talk my way out of it but it didn’t work. I also remember the patrolman’s observation when we were speaking. He told me “I had to give you the speeding ticket because you were just going too fast. And I had to see your bike.”

It was always like that wherever we went. Like Moses parting the Dead Sea I parted a crowd who were attending an opening of an art exhibition in Venice, California one night while I was just creeping along looking for somewhere to park. I came to a stop in front of Marisa Berenson, flanked by tons of her fans. She was walking towards me dressed like a bellhop from the 1920’s–red satin top and leggings and a little red cap with a strap under her chin. She looked at the Norton, and she and her crowd moved to the left and right and let me carry on through.

Once I encountered Nudie Cohn of Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors at a stoplight on Sunset Boulevard. Famous for the outrageous rinestone suits he designed for folks like Porter Wagoner, Roy Rogers and Elvis, he was driving one of his white Pontiac Bonneville convertables, complete with longhorn antlers on the hood. He pulled up beside me and as I looked towards his car I noticed everyone in the car craning their necks for a look at the Norton.

Over the years in California I rode it through the Santa Ynez, San Rafael and Sierra Madre Mountains, over most of the Pacific Coast Highway, as far south as Laguna Beach and north nearly to San Fransisco, and on virtually every freeway in Los Angeles. At moderate speeds it was “manageable,” at higher speeds I was “on the edge.” And, every time, I was invigorated riding the Norton–I was really brought to life.”

One night after too many gin and tonics at the bar in the Hotel Bel Air a Yugoslavian actress whose main claim to fame was playing “Gozer” in the original Ghost Busters, hit me with “Where’s the last place anyone in California would want to go?”

“What?” I said.

“Where’s the last place anyone in California would want to go?”

“Uh, Victorville” I replied, after some thought.

“Let’s go” she said.

Fourteen hours later we returned to West Hollywood after an all night ride through the mountains and the high desert–Route 2 out of Pasadena, through the San Gabriel Wilderness, past Mount Baldy (Mt. San Antonio–10,000 feet), through Big Pines to El Cajon Pass, all the way to Victorville. The stars. Jesus, the stars. The cool mountain air in the Wilderness and then the cool desert air between Cajon and Victorville was so fresh, and the fragrant smell of Desert Lavender and Jimson Weed (Sacred Datura) has been unforgettable.

My friends rode on the Norton with me: Bob, Jerry, Dominic, Elisa, Rip, Ricky, Karen, Wayne, Carole, Jeff, Susan, Nancy. More. I won’t drop names here but movie stars and rock stars were passengers on the Norton. Strangers wanted their photos taken with it. Over the years dozens of people have wanted to buy it.

To make sure Charlotte was “the right one for Kent,” as determined by “Bob and Jerry,” we rode from Santa Barbara to Laguna Beach for a weekend with Bob (an art consultant) and Jerry (a nurse), my dear friends who were known to so many to be the haven of Rest and Relaxation for artists, musician and actors. Bob installed us in the apartment beside the pool, where we found the bed strewn with rose petals and a Champagne bucket standing on the bedside table with Moet and Chandon on ice. We had such a great time we stayed an extra day, then headed back up the coast too late one night to get to Santa Barbara before 2:00 AM, but we were reluctant to leave those wonderful guys sooner. So we steamed up the Coast Highway at a steady 90 miles per hour and roared past the September surfing mecca at Rincon and the oil derricks, through the fog and mist, the Norton steady and rumbling along.

The Norton ended up back in Ohio at some point in the 90’s. I brought it to our home in Newfoundland in a trailer with a few significant family things when my mother had to move into a nursing home. My childhood friend, Roger MacClellan, helped me put it in the trailer. We muscled it aboard, cinched it down, had a laugh, embraced, and I took off for Newfoundland.

In Newfoundland I rode it for several summers. When I was first getting it ready to go, and over subsequent summers, neighbors I never saw before would stop by to look at it–Mr. Genge at 85, whistling through his teeth and shaking his head, and Dr. Ross, an English eye surgeon, after looking at it for a long time, declaring quietly “They were very fast.”

So I had the Norton for 53 years. The final reading on the odometer was 17,238
miles, every one of them clocked by me. The last time I rode it, it started on the third kick, just like the first time back in Burbank. I put two hundred miles on it that day, riding down to the Port aux Port Peninsula and then up to Woody Point in Gros Morne World Heritage Site. Wherever I stopped people would gather to look at it. I was followed on the 15 mile leg from Wiltondale to Woody Point through the mountains by a guy who just wanted to see it when I finally stopped at the wharf in Woody Point. The next night I had a fall carrying stuff up the steps to our house and that signaled the end of my motorcycle days.

I have one 40-second video clip of me starting it, and riding up the road that leads away from our house in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, and a few photos taken above Ojai in the Santa Ynez Mountains from 43 years ago. And I have some memories I can share, and I have some I can’t.

I sold it to an eccentric guy in Toronto in August and shipped it off to him in September, but I will never forget what it a thrill it was to ride while it was mine for over a half a century.

Douglas Walbourne Gough: An Interview

Interviewed by Justice Arkoh and David-Anaikot Oluwakemi Abisoye

Douglas Walbourne-Gough is a poet and mixed/adopted status member of the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation from Elmastukwek (the Bay of Islands), Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). His first collection, Crow Gulch, was published with Goose Lane Editions in 2019, has been nominated for several awards and won the 2021 EJ Pratt Poetry Award. His second collection- Island-centers around the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq experience in the wake of the Qalipu enrolment process, also from Goose Lane Editions. Color Work, a chapbook of poetry, was published with Anstruther Press in January 2024.

Kemi and Justice had a sneak peek into his world and how he navigates life as a writer in Atlantic Canada.


Kemi: Thank you for allowing us to interview you. Your reading was insightful, and I enjoyed it. Did you find the festival interesting? 


Douglas: Thank you for the kind words, Kemi, and I’m happy to interview with you. I’ve got a long love for literature and literary festivals. In the Corner Brook context, I’m keenly interested in Horseshoe.

I was a long-time fan of The March Hare – a literary festival that began in Corner Brook. In over 30 years, it expanded to multiple venues across Newfoundland and Labrador, Toronto, New York, and Ireland. I performed with The March Hare on two occasions. I also spent seven years planning and hosting The April Rabbit, an evening of literary and performing arts, with Dr. Stephanie McKenzie.

Now that both the Hare and the Rabbit are gone, the Horseshoe Literary Festival is a necessary revival of the literary festival in Corner Brook. I look forward to seeing how both Horseshoe and MALA grow and evolve.

The collaboration between Paper Mill Press and Horseshoe Literary Magazine is impressionable. I am excited that local writers in Corner Brook can submit their works and also get published.

Justice: Kindly walk us through your writing process. Do you begin with a place, a character, or an idea?

Douglas: Sometimes it’s an image, like the poem “Tuckamore,” (p. 59 of Island) which began from the image of people walking over the tops of tuckamore trees. My mind then decided that the tuckamore can be a metaphor for the resilience that is built as a byproduct of choosing to live on the island of Newfoundland, and how tourists often misinterpret this place and its people.

Other times, I’ll get a word, or phrase stuck in my head and the poem grows out of that. I’m just a nerdy person who’s happiest when spending hours thinking about the sounds, etymologies, and connotations of words.

Justice: How do your personal experiences shape the themes in your works?

Douglas: Island is an interpretation of my dreams, lived experiences, childhood, family interactions, and struggles with identity. Unlike Crow Gulch, which was mainly written through the lenses of social history and my paternal grandparents, Island posits me as the lens through which many different narrative threads can be read.

Kemi: Newfoundland’s geography and history play a significant role in your work. How do you think these elements shape the identity of your characters?

Douglas: Crow Gulch was written as a counter-narrative to the social history of Corner Brook. The people and place of Crow Gulch the community were omitted.

Island, in part, is a response to history that’s currently being made – the unfolding of the Qalipu enrolment process and its social, emotional, and political implications.

Justice: How do you see the relationship between place and identity in your writing?

Douglas: I am of this land. On a cellular level, I have been ingesting its freshwater, harvesting and eating its fish, moose, and berries. My body is built from so much that this place provides.

The topography, the history, and the culture of southwestern Newfoundland has also shaped my body, mind, and heart. I run and roam these hills. I canoe the ponds. I feel its joys and tragedies, and I always choose to call it home (something I hope I can continue to do, despite a poor economy and job prospects).

This is my home.

Kemi: You often blend historical and contemporary narratives. How do you approach balancing the past and present in your storytelling?

Douglas: I try to place the past, present, and potential future in a conversation with one another. I can’t truly see where I am or where I’m headed, if I don’t know where I’ve come from.

Kemi: Who are some of the writers or artists that have influenced your work the most? Are there contemporary Newfoundland writers whose work you admire?

Douglas: I was first struck by John Steffler’s poem “That Night We Were Ravenous.” A link to his reading of the poem can be found, here . I spent years copying John’s voice and thankfully, finally found my own. I’m currently engrossed with several writers- Allie Duff, Heather Nolan, Mary Dalton, Agnes Walsh, Terry Doyle, Lisa Moore, Shelly Kawaja, Lindsay Bird, Bridgette Canning, Aimee Wall, Megan Gail Coles, Robert Chafe, Maura Hanrahan, Shannon Webb-Campbell (missing names are not exclusions. I’m keeping the list to what I’m currently reading or have recently read).

Justice: You have won the Newfoundland Arts and Letters Award five times. What do you think you did right or have been doing right?

Douglas: This is a bit of a difficult question to answer. I’ve been an adjudicator for that prize on two occasions and can tell you with accuracy that the outcome of the prize, and almost all literary prizes, can be arbitrary. Your writing style may be rejected in one year but accepted in another. This is dependent on the judges’ preference. This is just the nature of literary awards in general.

I run many drafts on a poem before I submit it. A one-page poem may easily go through 75 drafts before I feel it’s ready to send out. I like to record myself reading it and listen back to see what’s working on a sonic level. When I think I’m done, I’m likely not.

Kemi: Your writing contributes to a larger conversation about Newfoundland’s identity in Canadian literature. How do you feel about this?

Douglas: There is no easy navigation of the Qalipu Mi’kmaw identity. I try to write from the nuanced angles from which no simple answers, or binary truths, exist.

Susie Taylor: An Interview

Interviewed by Mervyn Onyemaechi Ojukwu and Ijeoma Vivian Ezeike

Susie Taylor (she/her) is a queer writer and associate editor for fiction at Riddle Fence. She is based in Harbour Grace, Newfoundland. Her career as a writer began in 2015 when she won the year’s NLCU Fresh Fish Award for emerging writers. Since then, she has been known for her unique style which drives home a fresh standard for storytelling. When she isn’t writing, she is out running.

Mervyn Onyemaechi Ojukwu and Ijeoma Vivian Ezeike, sat down with Susie to learn more about her approach to storytelling, her previous and most recent works and her drive as a writer.

Even Weirder Than Before, your debut novel released in 2019, explored storytelling in the present tense and the coming-of-age story of Daisy Radcliffe, your protagonist. Can you shed light on the technicalities of writing in the present and your journey in writing a round character that evolves with the story?

Susie: Even Weirder Than Before was my first serious writing project. When I wrote it, I wasn’t thinking about writing in first person or present tense. I didn’t know terms like exposition or first-person narrative. I was just writing. There was an incredible freedom to that. I didn’t know enough about writerly conventions to overthink what I was doing. I trusted my instincts.

The novel is fiction but was heavily influenced by re-reading the diaries I kept as a teenager. I wanted to emulate the voice I used in those diaries – that urgent, self-involved, and frequently despairing language of puberty.

I wrote much of the book speaking aloud to myself as I typed. I would spend my writing time immersed in the character of Daisy. That influenced the style and speed of the language in the novel.

Daisy’s growth is evident in the novel. In what ways did the politics of gender, sexuality and family help shape the story’s plot and the growth of your protagonist?

Susie: The politics of gender and sexuality are embedded in everything I write. When I wrote Even Weirder Than Before, I was thinking back to my own experiences of growing up as a queer kid in the 80s and 90s. There was so much sexism and homophobia.

In Even Weirder Than Before, plot is less important than character development. Daisy and her mum are struggling against a society where women are expected to be polite and submissive. Misogyny creeps through the education system, popular culture, and their domestic lives. There are so many spoken and unspoken rules about how they are expected to be as women. Daisy and her mum have to reckon with those inequities to move forward in their lives.

In your book, Vigil, you wrote seventeen parallel short stories with different themes relating to drug dealings, sex and power. How did the diversification of this book make you explore your individuality as a writer, as well as the individuality of the community you grew up in as it relates to the location in which the stories are set?

Susie: I had been working on a few stories for a long period of time, they had received positive feedback, but writing them felt like being stuck in a boring conversation at a dinner party. Writing them felt like the literary equivalent of eating steamed broccoli. I made a pact with myself that I would not write boring stories anymore. I stopped trying to finesse stories I had lost interest in. It was at that point that new voices and characters started showing up. Figuring out my individuality as a writer is an ongoing process, but the range of stories in Vigil has hopefully strengthened my voice.

Bay Mal Verde is inspired by Harbour Grace where I live. It is a rugged and isolated landscape, but also a populated one. It’s a place where everyone knows you. Those factors up the stakes when things go wrong in my characters’ lives. Writing about Bay Mal Verde meant I had a canvas to put my stories on, and that canvas had geographical edges and a social texture that my stories had to adhere to.

Your literary works are unique to certain locations, is it safe to say that locations and places drive you as a writer to tell stories? And how do you juxtapose the uniqueness of particular locations in humanizing them as characters, the way you did with certain stories in Vigil?

Susie: I didn’t grow up in Newfoundland. I grew up in Ontario, and when I write about Newfoundland, and Bay Mal Verde, I am very aware of that. I am a part, and apart from this place.

My parents immigrated from the UK when I was very young, and I don’t have family ties to any particular geographic location. There is no hometown for me to go back to. I find it difficult to answer the question Where are you from? Is that the place I was born? Is it where I grew up? I no longer visit or have any connection to those places.

Harbour Grace is my home, where I own a house, where I live my life, but I’m not from here.

At some level, all writers are trying to answer questions through their writing. I’m always thinking about: Where do I belong? Do I belong? What is it like to belong?

I am interested in places and I often start with location when I write.
For me, places have personalities, and it was natural to write about place as something that felt and thought.

In what ways would you encourage young creatives to establish their drive and style in storytelling drawing from your personal experiences and journey as a writer, and how does that choice ultimately influence their “oeuvre” as creatives?

Susie: To encourage young creatives to establish their drive and style, I would say, be fearless in your writing. Writing is a practice. Writing is work. Write and read. The work you put in will be evident in the strength of your art.

Tom Halford: An Interview

Interviewed by Shaki Talukder and Luo Yishun

Tom Halford grew up in New Brunswick, then moved to Newfoundland, then to South Korea, then to New York, then back to Newfoundland, then to South Korea, and finally back to Newfoundland, where he and his family fully intend to stay.

Tom has published scholarly essays, a novel titled Deli Meat, a book of poetry called Mill Rat, and a book of concrete poetry called The Abstracts.

MALA students- Shaki Talukder and Luo Yishun- had a chat with him about life as a creative writer, as well as a professor of English at Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus.

What led you to choose Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Grenfell Campus for your teaching career? Comparing opportunities to teach at universities like SUNY Plattsburgh and Chonnam National University in South Korea, what makes teaching at MUN special?

The truth is that my wife, Melissa, got a job at Grenfell Campus, and I tagged along. It wasn’t until we had been living here for a few years that I was able to secure regular employment. Having said that, we did choose to live in Newfoundland and Labrador—specifically Corner Brook—for a few different reasons. It’s a wonderful place to raise our kids, and we love Newfoundland and Labrador. I don’t know if I can fully articulate the draw of this island, but it’s powerful. We loved living in America and working within the SUNY system, and we loved living in South Korea. Chonnam National University is an excellent school. But there is no place in the world like Newfoundland and Labrador. Having said all of that, Grenfell offers the teaching situation that I like the most. I get to meet students and get to know them. They get to know me, and I feel like I can help them progress through their university career. I’m part of a community here, and that informs my approach. The students here are smart, but they also know when to call someone on their BS. Academics need be grounded and listen to their community. You have these types of connections at Grenfell, and it’s something that I really appreciate. 

How has living in the unique cultural and geographical setting of Newfoundland shaped your perspectives as a writer and educator?

Newfoundland and Labrador changes you. There’s no doubt that. It’s important to be observant of where we are in the world and of the rich, cultural traditions here. I also think it’s important to remember that Memorial University was founded to memorialize Newfoundlanders who lost their lives during World War One. I try to keep this as a focal point when I’m working. I owe something to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador. I have to work hard, and I have to work to the best of my abilities. This reminder shapes my perspective as an educator, and I hope it keeps me humble. As a writer, I don’t know if there’s a better place to be than Corner Brook. It feels as though we have authors popping out of every nook and cranny. Turn around and someone is publishing something amazing. I learn so much from talking to other writers, from listening to them, and from reading their work. We have a vibrant and supportive writing community. It’s really helpful. 

How does your experience teaching English and ESL in Corner Brook influence your writing and scholarly research?

This is a complicated one for me. As an ESL teacher, I’ve travelled to South Korea, and I’ve read some wonderful Korean authors such as Han Kang and Young-Ha Kim. While I was in Seoul, I found one book in particular that was a translation, and it was a quirky, crime novel that had literary elements. It had a penguin on the cover, and the author was from Eastern Europe. I think about that novel all the time in the sense that I often strive to write something similar to it. But here is the most frustrating thing. I cannot remember the author or the title! We forgot the book in Korea! In that sense being an ESL teacher has deeply informed my style as a writer. Now that I’m an English teacher, I’ve gone back to many of the literary artists who I loved when I was doing my own English degree. These authors include Flannery O’Connor, Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, and Alistair MacLeod. So, I’ve started to appreciate some of these authors in new ways. I think reading them has been really helpful for my writing in refining my own voice and style. 

What are the most rewarding and challenging aspects of teaching English within the Newfoundland community?

I love the way Newfoundlanders use English. It is playful and profound and wildly creative. Newfoundland and Labrador is a writer’s paradise. There are so many wonderful turns of phrase and expressions that Newfoundlanders use that you don’t hear in other parts of the world. The other remarkable thing about being here in Corner Brook is that writers get a lot of support from the community. Andrew Testa and I have published three local authors through Horseshoe Community Press. People seem to be really interested in the work that we’re doing, and it’s been great to publish these authors.

Your work spans writing, teaching, and tutoring. How do you balance these roles, and how do they complement each other in your professional life?

My writing has been informed of my teaching and tutoring. I’ve been exposed to so many stories and authors that I would not have otherwise. I also have been really grateful to see how students respond to certain stories and certain moments in stories. Some of my most beloved stories fall flat in certain classrooms. This reminds me that everyone has different tastes, and the most important thing I can do is cultivate my own style. I can’t worry about pleasing everyone because that will never happen. I can however, figure out my own strengths and weaknesses as an author, and I can keep improving on my own material. The same can be said for my teaching approach as it relates to what I have learned from tutoring. When I’m evaluating essays, I’m always going back to the core principles of tutoring. I always try to respond to my students as a reader; I try to engage them in some kind of conversation about their work; and I try to see the best in their writing. I try to avoid dwelling too much on error correction. The discourse on writing tutoring, for me at least, is really the path forward for how teachers can best help students improve their writing.

With your busy schedule balancing work and family, how do you find the energy to write, and where do you find inspiration for your research and writing?

Sometimes I feel pretty tired. But Melissa and my kids, Violet and Douglas, are really supportive. We all enjoy reading and being creative in our own ways. I think that we support each other quite a bit. Melissa has a podcast, for example, called Could Read, Should Read, Must Read, and it’s all about books and book culture. So, there’s some blurring between my personal and professional lives. In a more concrete way, I get up early to do my creative writing. I try to have my morning coffee as close to six as possible, and that’s when I start writing. I have about an hour, and I find I can get a lot done if I stay focused. If I’m into a particular piece, I prefer to write rather than to read or to watch TV. It’s kind of like a form of entertainment. Oftentimes, I’m watching and listening to the characters and just recording what they do. It’s fun. That’s really why I write. It brings me so much happiness and excitement, and I find inspiration all around
me. Writing takes you away from the world, but it can also be helpful in negotiating yourself in relation to the world. It’s a beautiful, wonderful gift to be able to write. In many ways, the act of writing brings its own inspiration.

From your experience, what essential skills should students develop to excel in English literature and language studies?

I hope this isn’t boring, but I think it comes down to whether or not students can form a consistent habit of writing. I would say that I’m addicted to writing. I’m lucky that I have a good addiction, but that’s what it is. I can feel my body change when I am working on something. I’m completely gone from the world, and I’m buzzing. Everyone doesn’t get addicted to writing. However, everyone can set aside an hour out of their day three times a week and sit at a table with a pen and paper. This habit of writing allows a person to think through written language. It takes a lot of time to improve, but the more your practice, the more you should get better. In a more specific response, I actually think it’s easy to understand the basic structure of a paragraph for an essay. If you can figure out how a paragraph is supposed to work, then everything else falls into place. It’s difficult to write great paragraphs that grab a reader’s attention. However, I don’t think it’s difficult to write a good paragraph that advances an argument. 

What advice would you offer to aspiring writers and educators who aim to make meaningful contributions to both academia and their local communities?

It’s not always easy to remove your own self-interest—in fact, it might be impossible—but I think people can tell when you’re genuinely interested in learning from them, and I know that students really want their work to be valued. You have to take a lot of time and put a lot of effort into listening and learning from other people. You have to remind yourself to be humble, and from time to time, you have to laugh at yourself. People see right through scholars and writers who are full of themselves and who have no interest in anyone or anything besides themselves. So, you have to work really hard to be the opposite of that. It’s not just that you try to think of yourself as an average
person. You have to think of yourself as less than average. You have to earn the right to teach and write and edit. You’re no better than the people and the students you’re helping; you’re just all at various stages. There’s that and there’s also the cliche that it takes all kinds to make the world. It’s okay if someone disagrees with you about something. It doesn’t mean they’re evil or stupid (it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not either). It just means that you might want to withhold judgement and think about how you might be wrong; that’s the best chance you have to learn something.

Book Review: One Big Time By Lisa Fishman

Reviewed by Benjamin Siemon Gorman

One Big Time by Lisa Fishman captures the poet’s experiences during a two-week quarantine in Northeastern Ontario. Structured as daily journal entries from July 10 to July 24, Fishman draws on her physical and emotional environment to explore themes of place, time, and memory. Fishman’s poems are more than simple reflections—they are quiet meditations on what it means to exist in relation to the natural world, and on what truly goes on in a person’s mind during moments of silence and tranquility. Each entry, though rooted in the day-to-day experience of quarantine, seems to paint a larger picture of how we perceive and live through those times.

The collection begins with the section dated July 10–13, which sets the tone for Fishman’s One Big Time. From the first line, Fishman emphasizes her physical presence in a natural environment. She writes,

you could just say
not anything
in the forest
under hemlock (3)

This kind of consciousness is important to highlight, as the line invites multiple interpretations. On one hand, it could be read as Fishman suggesting that one might choose not to name or describe what she sees in the forest under the hemlock. In this sense, it becomes a form of respectful silence, a way of leaving the forest as it is. At the same time, the phrase carries a quiet tension: the desire to say something is weighed against the awareness that speaking might distort or reduce what is being observed.

Additionally, her choice of words in the next line “meant to write waterbody / but it came out waterbeing” (3) is particularly interesting. I wonder what was going through her mind at that moment, but my instinct tells me that waterbody represents a vessel, while waterbeing suggests something more spiritual that is a reference to the idea that the water is alive, not just a static body. She continues, “it came out waterbeing/under treebody,” (p3) reinforcing the notion that both water and trees are not merely objects in the place she is in but rather living beings. This way of writing invites readers to see the world differently and also reinforces the concept that everything around us is interconnected.

Her journey to find the passage to the other lake begins with a reflection on how it feels to be outside versus how it feels inside her “borrowed cabin.” She writes:

it’s different outside how the ground is
warm: springy, moss-covered and
root-traversed, very warm
underfoot, under trees’
shade
the borrowed cabin’s
new laminate floor makes your feet
very cold (3)

This contrast highlights her growing sensitivity to the difference between artificial environments and the living world. The forest floor is warm, textured, and alive; the cabin’s floor is flat, cold, and synthetic. This contrast not only sets a sensory tone for the book, it also suggests that genuine presence and insight come from engaging with what is living and natural, rather than with what is man-made. The cabin floor, like many artificial environments, creates a sense of distance and discomfort, whereas the forest invites connection, warmth, and awareness.

She makes a similar comparison on July 19, when reflecting on her proximity to a loon:

Here on a rock I see the loon
does not perceive me
as a threat. She ate her lunch
looning around
in circles, going under
& coming back, always within
12 feet of me
but in water if I approach
she goes under
& disappears
disliking
boat’s vibration
in her element

But on the ground a mother grouse
and 2 young freely walk

around the cabin—they’re not afraid
of people, said Gillian (33-34)

Fishman’s theme of place and time is brilliantly explored in the book. The poet’s descriptions of her surroundings establish place as a central idea in her narration. Whether it is the forest under hemlock, the swift current of the lake, or her repeated attempts to find a map to locate the other lakes, the use of the place and time is a creative way to explore her thoughts because it becomes a space for reflection and discovery. For instance in July 14, she writes;

5:30 a.m.
Morning star and Crescent moon
in dusky light (orange red purple)
an hour later, light’s bright yellow
then silvery yellow
then clear or no color, transparent
light
A novel confused me just this year
bc she was talking about dusk
first thing in the morning, at dawn
so I looked into it and sure enough
dusk is really
a quality of light, not a time of day
(light with colors). . . .  (15)

In this passage, she brilliantly reflects on a moment of past confusion and through her observation, she makes an impressive discovery that dusk is not strictly a time of day, but a quality of light. This reflection made from the place she was in also signals an important shift away from conventional, clock-based thinking. In these poems time is not measured by numbers, but by shifts in perception, light, and mood.

Again, she notes that, “Two weeks is better than one week,” (7). A discovery made from “staying in place” (7) expresses how duration shapes depth of experience. With more time, her observation becomes sharper, and the poems become more immersive.

 She returns to this fluid, relational view of time in her entry for July 21–22, where she writes:

Time’s named like
connecting lakes
—this day, that day—
If you could say water’s
continuous, one
continuous body of water
that goes over land
here, there,
then of time you cd say
the same: it’s one big time
with different names
(yesterday, today, &c) (44)

The comparison of time and water in these lines reinforces the belief that time is not linear but continuous—fluid, borderless, and always in motion.

Like place and time, memory is also explored in the poems. Fishman’s use of language to create a mental picture of her memories is incredible. For instance, in the July 21 – 22 entry, she writes:

“I looked at the date and waited
to remember what’s important about it—
…the death date of my dad (2010)
So call your sister, he’d say.” (45)

This moment is rendered with emotional restraint, yet it resonates deeply. How she presents the memory as something that has to be “waited” for, is intriguing and striking. She also embeds memory in the place she found herself. An instance is in July 23-24 entry where she recalls her mother’s question about the patterns on stone and then sees  the same patterns reflected in light on the lake. In her words,

Light on the water
(maple) leaves in the light
over water
from here (under hemlock
above water) i can see
the answer to a question of my mother’s:
the “pockmark” pattern on the stones
is the same as the pattern on the water
in a light
current when the lake is quiet
so
a shift in the medium (element)
repeats the pattern

(50)

These moments suggest that memory is not stored only in the mind, but in the body, in the land, and in the way we perceive and connect to our surroundings.

Another distinctive and quietly brilliant aspects of One Big Time is Fishman’s playful yet purposeful use of acrostics. These vertical compositions appear sporadically throughout the book.

These include:

•          D A W N – Dear / Anyone / With or Without / Names (9)

•          D U S K – Day-and night / Unselving with / Shushing wind at however many / Knots  (9)

•          S W I M – Sleek Widening Instant’s Magnet (10)

•          T I M E – Tremor / Is / Many / Elders /, or / Tree / Is / Many / Elders, or /Try / ing / mouth’s / enterior  (10)

•          U. S. – Undone States (16)

•          N O R T H – Nearly / Out of / Reach She / Talks not to / Herself (16)

•          B L U R  – Be–/Longing /Unto /Rain (21)

•          L O O N – Letters / One by One and / Now (51)

Each of these acrostics invites the reader to consider not only what the word means but how it means, and how it might behave differently when disassembled. This shows that language can shift in meaning depending on our experience and the context in which it is encountered.

One Big Time is an intimate, thought-provoking, and deeply engaging compilation of experiences, narrated by a voice that gently guides the reader through a journey of attention, reflection, and presence. I thoroughly enjoyed being part of that journey and found myself immersed in it.provoking, and deeply engaging compilation of experiences, narrated by a voice that gently guides the reader through a journey of attention, reflection, and presence. I thoroughly enjoyed being part of that journey and found myself immersed in it.

Adam Beardsworth

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