Jessica said no.

  Then, she reached over and knocked Pink’s sandwich on the floor. The bread opened and the meat lay on the dirty tiles.

  Pink looked at Jessica and smiled.

  The other girls stared in disbelief, one whispering behind her hand of cards that maybe they were finally going to have the knock-down, drag-em-out fight everyone had anticipated.

  Pink simply nodded and kept smiling. Then she handed Jessica the gift bag with the package in it. “I got you something, something I know you will want to own, something you probably already have but have forgotten how to use. But you mustn’t open it in front of everyone. It is a peace offering between me and you. I really do want us to be friends, so please accept this in the spirit in which it is given. And don’t open it now.”

  Jessica glared at Pink, then tore off the paper.

  “There is nothing you can give me, you cow, no crap you can shove in my face that would make me stop loathing you or your ugly name.” The other girls were silent. Pink sat with her hands folded in her lap.

  Inside the box, among the tissue paper, was an envelope, and on the front of the envelope was an inscription: “For Jessica, my special friend—please don’t share this with anyone.” Jessica immediately tore the envelope open and pulled out a small piece of paper. She stared at the paper, and then crumpled it into the palm of her hand. She stood up, glared at Pink, and began to cry, then ran sobbing from the cafeteria.

  “What did you say to make her do that?” Ann asked.

  Pink shrugged. “I simply told her I forgave her, and that I wanted to be her friend and that we would share some wonderfully guarded secrets with each other such as the magical meanings of our names.”

  Toll

  TWO BELLS SUMMONED the children of our street—one they liked and the other they found fascinating. The ice cream truck was famous. Mike, the scooper, had five flavours though only three on hot days because his fridges never worked well. The other was a brass bell.

  The old man who rang the brass bell would never tell us his name and he spoke with a foreign accent as his foot pumped the treadle and sparks flew from his grindstone. Our mothers relied on his infrequent appearances. The grinder rang his bell and pulled the stone behind him on a wooden cart when he was tired and pushed it uphill when he turned the corner onto the next street. We would ask to ring the bell, but he always said no.

  McBride’s great-grandmother had pared her favourite blade down to a fish-knife, but its second life as a de-boner saved the implement from the trash. The pointed tip was sensitive to the smallest salmon vertebrae because McBride’s mother understood that knives, like everything else, can do unexpected things.

  Everyone liked McBride. He was always involved in whatever we were doing—the first one out on the street for road hockey, the last one to come in. What was more, he owned one of the nets, so he had to be part of things. He wasn’t a bad goalie, and in the summer, when our street turned dusty and games relocated to the local diamond where we played baseball instead, he was a pretty good catcher though his throws to second were always slow.

  McBride’s mother had been on the phone when the grinder walked by, clanging his grinder’s brass bell like a teacher in a school yard to scold scufflers. It rang with every third step the grinder took. The grinder was walking faster than usual, perhaps because he disliked the kids gathering round, or perhaps because he had to be somewhere at the end of his daily grind. McBride’s mother called to him to catch the knife man before he turned onto the next block, and running back to his front porch, she handed McBride the old, dulled blade.

  The next day the teacher rang her recess bell—a brass dome with a worn black wooden handle—and everyone lined up at the double doors as usual. When the Principal appeared instead of letting us in, we knew what was going to be said. We knew he was going to tell us that running with a knife can be lethal.

  Seeing the boy writhe in agony on the sidewalk, the grinder decided not to stick around and simply walked away. When he turned the corner onto the next street, his bell began to toll again.

  Tentacle

  ONE OF THE beach-goers ran to get a bottle of Windex from his car. The boy’s screams were softer by the time the man returned and poured what he had left of the blue liquid on the angry red welts.

  The tentacle had left a pattern around the boy’s torso. His chest heaved, and he coughed. He might have been coughing up salt water, but he hadn’t drowned. Most people know what to do with drowning victims. They push out the water and breathe into the lungs. But this was different. This boy had been stung.

  A policeman arrived and stood over the boy, cradling the child’s head in his hand, asking: “Where are your parents?” And looking up anxiously in the hope they might appear. Those in the crowd looked over their shoulders for someone to arrive, but no one came to claim the child.

  Neville stood and watched.

  He tried to speak up, to tell the officer that Gary’s parents were at their cottage, and that it wasn’t far away, but he didn’t know where, exactly. His words were drowned out by the policeman.

  The officer shouted: “Everyone back. Give the kid some air.” He lifted a walk-talkie to his mouth and said: “What’s the ETA on the ambulance?”

  A stout, hairy-chested man whose belly protruded over the top of his swim trunks spoke up. “I pulled him in. I don’t know who he is.”

  Gary gasped, and his eyes went wide. The policeman picked up the stricken boy and carried him in his arms to the public parking lot. Neville stood still, turned, and watched the sunlight sparkling on the low waves.

  Three days before the tentacle attached itself to the stricken boy, Neville had met Gary on the beach. It was low-tide. The water was shallow and almost dead calm in the fog. They struck up a conversation.

  Neville admired Gary’s mask and snorkel and said he wished he had one too.

  Gary had told him that he’d spotted pirate’s treasure just off shore about twenty yards.

  “It is deep there,” Neville said, half to warn, and half inspired by Gary’s courage. They had climbed out to the end of the black break wall rocks the beach authority installed to keep the sand from eroding. They peered between the boulders at the periwinkles. Gary tried to scrape some of them off because he said they were a nuisance.

  “They just cling to things and don’t do nothing else.”

  As the ambulance pulled away, Neville picked up the mask and snorkel Gary had left behind.

  The policeman approached and stood where Gary had been laid on the sand. He pulled out a notebook and began to write. The hairy chested man gave his name.

  “My name is Neville,” the boy said to the policeman, clutching the mask and snorkel tightly by the straps.

  “Don’t need yours son. You’re a minor. Run along, now. And stay out of the water. I’m having a sign posted today. It’s man’o war season.”

  Neville wondered what a man’o war was. He pictured a galleon. Maybe it was the one returning to find the lost treasure Gary had spotted.

  He sat down on the sand and stared at the ocean.

  It was too beautiful to be off limits, and he only had a few days more left in his vacation. The waters were sparkling. Neville imagined each pinpoint of light as the soul of a drowned pirate signalling for help by flashing a doubloon in the sun.

  Bicycle Bell

  UNCLE THOMAS TOLD me never to ring my bicycle bell as I approached someone’s house. It was a sign of ill omen. “Best to be a shadow and come and go,” he said.

  I had a paper route. When he was young, and sold The Telegram on a street corner instead of having a door to door paper route, all he had to do was hold up a copy. But because I had to deliver the news door to door, Uncle Thomas showed me how to roll up the paper into a log and tuck the edges together as if I was settling the hands of a corpse in a final clasp. But Uncle Thomas gave up being a newsy and became a telegram boy for Canadian Pacific. The money was better. “Newsies had it rough,” he said, as he puffed on his pipe and stared at the back garden.

  Every now and then, he’d nod at some imaginary person who stood beside the fence or bent over the flower bed. In the good weather, I’d join him on the wooden steps, and he’d offer random bits of wisdom, and tell me to remember what he said. I can’t remember most of it, but one of the things he said most often and shake his head with a “no” was: “You never want to be the bearer of bad news.”

  When my grandmother and Uncle Thomas were out one day, I found the family album in its hiding place in the dining room sideboard. I came across a snapshot of Uncle Thomas in his navy-blue uniform with brass buttons down the front. He wore a French policeman’s hat. The hat had a shiny black peak. He had a leather bag slung over his shoulder. He was standing next to his bicycle. Uncle Thomas never married, and by the time I was a boy in the early Sixties, he’d grown hard of breathing, as he put it, from smoking a pipe he fancied. That night I thought I would ask him about it, about what the city was like back then. He must have known it well, riding up and down its streets, searching out addresses and bringing his news to every nook and cranny.

  Uncle Thomas was smoking his pipe and let me have a drag on it. He said I was old enough. I was ten. I told him it tasted bitter, and it did—the sour mouthpiece, and acrid smoke. “It’s all bitter,” he replied, taking the pipe back. He stared at the flower bed for several minutes. He looked at me as if I was asking too much. Maybe I was. Then he tapped his pipe on the steps and the ashes fell between the treads.

  “One day I had to bring three telegrams to a woman.” He paused. “That was the worst day of my life. People hated the sight of the telegram boy. I was the angel of death. The woman of the house opened the envelopes, opened them slowly, one by one—one for her husband and two for her boys—and I think she hoped at least one message would say that one of them was wounded and might come back to her. She sank down on the doorstep and clutched my arm so tight I had black bruises from her fingertips. She wept for a few minutes, and then fell silent. I got up to leave, and she pulled me back down. ‘Please don’t leave,’ she repeated until her words became a whisper. So, I sat there with her, our feet sticking out the door, splayed in front of us. We just sat in silence. I have never been able to hear wind through leaves since then as merely wind through leaves. I heard it as the silence of a broken heart.”

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  “We sat there all day. Night fell. Stars appeared through the boughs of the maples. She put her head against my shoulder and eventually she fell asleep, so I picked her up as best I could and carried her to the settee in her parlor. When I got back to the depot, I was docked a day’s pay. The chief clerk said I’d be sacked if it happened again, that I was slacking off, and had to mend my ways. I wish I could have mended more, I told him, but world doesn’t work that way.”

  Then, Uncle Thomas pointed with the stem of his pipe toward the flower bed.

  “Your grandfather planted roses there. Your uncle Jimmy and your Uncle Michael were prize-winning gardeners, too. I can still see them standing there, turning over the earth as if they were trying to find a shred of beauty in the muck, as if they were looking for the life they were certain that was down in the ground. All my life I’ve been looking for it, too, and never found it. I should have been better at what I did. I’ve never known what to say, never found the words to say it. I’ve been the shadow at the door. But the one day I needed to be professional, the one day I needed to be the perfect telegram boy, I wasn’t. I spent the better part of my life walking up to doors, handing people news, some of it good but most of it bad, and the hardest path I ever had to walk was the one to the front door of this house as I handed the telegrams to my mother.”

  The Fishers

  HIS GRANDSON WAS five now, the age at which the old man had been taught to fish by his grandfather. The finest fishing places where the grandfather had first cast his lines were far to the south, so close to the city that they had been swallowed by subdivisions and the overlay of streets. Streams where the trout once ran were now buried as sewer lines to catch the run-off from house farms where dwellings ran in repetitive ranks, some on curving crescents and others on straight avenues. The best creeks had dried up. The world was dying before his eyes. It wasn’t fair that this should happen. Instead of fighting progress, the old man decided to head north beyond the reach of change and teach his grandson the beauty and stillness of fishing.

  Sunlight was sparkling on the tea-coloured river. A woman with a kind face had told them they could use her landing dock for casting their lines. She said the fish liked to gather on summer mornings beneath a pod of willows on the far shore, though that had been some time ago, and she warned they might not catch anything no matter how long they waited. Her husband hadn’t caught anything there in ten years. She said it was not because he hadn’t taken the time to sit still and drop his line; it was just the changes in the water.

  The old man was certain he could prove her wrong. There’d been a lot of rain in the past week and the water levels were high, but the current tailed off to a lazy drift. Cool and slow in the sunlight. He told his grandson how fish like to shelter in the shadows.

  The dock sat low in the water. It leaned to one side where a broken gunnel was submerged, and the boy took the old man’s hand as they carefully walked around the wet portion of the slanted platform. Orange moss was growing on the boards. The old man sat down and removed his shoes and socks and set them behind him beside the tackle box so he could let his toes and ankles feel the current. The boy wasn’t sure he wanted to remove his runners.

  “It isn’t cold,” the old man said.

  He nestled the boy to the other side of him. The child held up his feet, one at a time, and reached around behind the old man to set his empty runners and short navy socks beside his grandfather’s.

  “There we go,” the old man said. “Side by side, and foot by foot.”

  After feeding the hook with a worm from a Mason jar—something that troubled the boy who asked if the worm felt pain to which the old man shook his head, “No,” they dropped their lines in the river. The red and white floats bobbed, and the lead sinkers held the hook end of the lines taut.

  “Now we just sit and wait for something to happen.”

  “What do we think about?” the boy asked.

  “Anything you want. Fishing is not about catching fish as it is about sitting here, dreaming whatever you want to dream, and waiting quietly for the sun to climb over our shoulders and settle on the far bank among the trees. That’s when it will be time to call it a day.”

  The old man could hear the current moving softly downstream and could feel the flow as it ran cool between his toes. A leaf floated by. Later, a branch broken from a tree upstream drifted past. The boy shut his eyes and turned his face to the sun.

  Would his grandson remember this day years from now when, perhaps, with a grandchild of his own, he would share the patient pleasure of being a fisher? So many moments, so much sadness, and sometimes joy, too, had converged to bring them there. And for one instant, the old man wanted time to cease—the river, the calm stillness in the trees, his grandson, and even himself—and all the people and places and things worth loving in the world to live forever.

  Acknowledgements

  Some of the stories in this book have appeared in literary magazines and zines in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. The author is grateful to the editors for their support and encouragement.

  “Cadenza,” appeared on Fictive Dream zine (USA).

  “Consuelo” appeared in Reflex Fiction (UK).

  “Toll” and “Alabaster” placed fourth and fifth respectively in the London Independent Short Fiction Prize and were published on the prize’s website (UK).

  “What Kasha Said,” appeared in Parhelion Literary Magazine (USA).

  “Edible Flowers,” appeared in the anthology Heat the Grease, published by Gnashing Teeth Press (USA).

  “Popcorn,” “Bicycle Bell,” and “Monster,” appeared on Story Pub (UK).

  “The Sophomore Philosophy Club,” appeared on Half a Grapefruit (Toronto).

  “Sadness,” won fourth prize in the Bath Short Story Prize (UK) and appeared in the Bath Short Story Prize Anthology, 2019.

  “Ear to the Ground,” appeared on Blue Nib (US).

  “Warts” appeared in The Blake Jones Review (Canada) and received the second-place prize in their annual fiction competition.

  The author is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council and its Recommender Grants Program for their gracious support. The funds helped bring this project to completion. The grants received were from Exile Editions, Black Moss Press, Guernica Editions, Insomniac Press, The New Quarterly, and The Porcupine’s Quill. Many thanks to Tim and Elke Inkster, Marty Gervais, Michael Callaghan, Michael Mirolla, and Mike O’Connor for their recommendations.

  The author wishes to thank Michael Mirolla for his editorial insights and feedback, David Moratto for his excellent design, Anna Van Valkenberg for her tireless promotion of this and my other Guernica Editions books, Trasie Sands, Dave Gregory, Antonia Facciponte and Benjamin Berman Ghan for their helpful suggestions as I talked through some of the challenges of these stories, Aaron Reynolds and Linda Laforge of Word Up, Barrie for permitting me to road-test some of these stories in front of a live audience, Dr. Carolyn Meyer and Margaret Meyer for their continued enthusiasm, and Katie Meyer and Kerry Johnston for their unending love and support.

  About the Author