My older brother George said he would get lost in there even though he knew the paths he ran with the older boys. He told me there were hiding places in the bushes and ‘forts’ as he called them. He never showed them to me saying it was too dangerous. Criminals and bums loitered in the ravine. The older boys frequented the inaccessible places where they smoked or hung out and carve their initials on the trunks of trees or took girls down into the overgrowth where they would make out.

  At first, Tommy accepted me and obeyed my instructions to keep up with me as I hurried home to catch the superhero cartoons. Sometimes he slowed me down.

  He would hold up watercolor paintings he had done in art time each day, splashes of black and red paint. I was supposed to guess what they were, The first several days, I could tell what his brushwork attempted to depict and could name the object – house, school, tree, horse. But on the fifth day, I got the answer wrong. I had no idea what the splotch was supposed to be and because my response was incorrect Tommy told me I was stupid and I didn’t know anything, not even the shorter way home.

  I learned, years later, that another boy in Tommy’s circle of friends showed off to him by insisting there was a shorter way home, a way that cut an extra half hour off the walk. I told my charge there was no shorter ‘other’ way home. We had to take a turn here or there and follow the road until it connected to another street. He wanted to go through the valley. That was the shortcut. I was stupid not to cut through the ravine. I told him my way was the safest but where the road bridged the creek with a tunnel overpass Tommy bolted down the hill.

  The way down was icy. For Tommy, who was considerably lighter, the steep hill was a slide, and he went down it on his ass. I slipped on the way down as I chased him, calling his name, ordering him to come back, shouting he didn’t know what lay ahead in the thickets and would get lost, freeze to death in the snow or, worse, meet up with one of the shadow men my brother had seen in the hollow.

  Holding his artwork in one hand and a dangling red mitten on a string in the other, Tommy turned and stuck his tongue out at me, then ran into the thicket. I tried to follow him, but the sun sets early in mid-December and the shadows are long and purple and a five-year-old in a navy coat blends with the ghosts of trees and the dark outlines they cast on newly fallen snow. Within seconds, Tommy Gill was gone.

  I thought I was running after him, but my footing went out from under me. I fell and hurt my back, When I reached the bottom where the creek argued with itself as it flowed between channels of ice and tried to force river stones out of its path, I stood and listened, hoping to hear the crunch of Tommy’s steps in the boot-deep snow but all I heard was the creek and wind haunting the trees. Behind me, in the distance, a light from the kitchen of the last house threw a glow on the hillside.

  I made my way up the incline. Hawthorn trees on the slope reached out and tore my coat as if someone had fought with me. One thorn put a gash in my cheek. That would be important.

  I struggled because I kept slipping on the ice beneath the day’s snowfall. I pounded on the side entrance of the house where the kitchen light shone. After banging on the aluminum storm door for what felt like an eternity but was only five minutes according to the woman who answered, the inner door opened a crack on the chain and a nose and a pair of eyes peered out at me, asking what I wanted, suspicious I was a hoodlum.

  The woman began to close the door on me, to ignore me and pretend I wasn’t there when, through tears, I cried and sputtered to describe how a little boy in my care might be in danger. All she heard of my plea was ‘little boy.’ She saw my jacket torn. She saw the blood on my face. She told me to stand where I was while she phoned the police. When she returned she asked what I had done to the child. I broke down and all I said was, ‘He’s gone.”

  My tears were my undoing.

  The prosecuting attorney would point out my wild state of mind suggesting I knew the boy had come to harm, that I had lost control and done terrible things to him. How else could I have known something was wrong?

  The police arrived with dogs and the search went long into the night.

  I was taken home.

  My father believed the police. He told me I was a ‘no good kid.’

  My mother told him he was wrong, insisting the school had chosen me over other boys to see the new arrival safely home.

  The principal said he’d never had any trouble with me until then and had seemed a nice boy, and maybe he was wrong to have placed his trust in me.

  A psychologist said I was disturbed. My father’s rejection of me – even though my father was an alcoholic – had triggered ‘problems, deep-seated anger, and a form of juvenile maladjustment that caused me to harm Tommy.’

  The police said Tommy must have put up a fight. That’s I got my gash. The prosecutor produced photos of Tommy’s half naked body, his artwork pinioned to a bare branch on a hawthorn, his neck turned in an awkward direction as if he were looking away from his attacker in disbelief. All I had to show in my defense was a fading bruise on my backside no one wanted to see.

  My days in court were followed by years in detention where I was whipped by the warden for being hungry, beaten for being the last one out of my bed one morning, burned by an older boy’s contraband cigarette for insisting I was innocent.

  The boy said, ‘no one is innocent in here. The court says so.’

  The psychiatrist assigned to my case asked how I felt toward poor little Tommy. I said I wanted to smack him. Tommy Gill was a bad child, a little cuss who thought he knew better. I wanted my life back.

  The sentence did not end when I reached my eighteenth birthday. Tommy’s parents appeared at all my parole hearings and insisted I should rot in prison.

  I am still in prison. I had my forty-sixth birthday yesterday.

  When I was being transferred last week to a medium-security prison out west, we flew over the suburb where the streets wound around each other the way a tangled length of string or garden hose gets knotted into a puzzle no one can undo it. The streetlamps below had just been switched on. Their haloes fell on the snowy crescents and cul de sacs. The unlit ravine remained a wound cut across the neighborhood.

  I can’t say who killed Tommy Gill, but I confess I failed in my responsibility.

  I should have grabbed him by the sleeve of his snowsuit and held him tight as if I were holding on to my own life. I accepted my responsibility and failed.

  When I am awake at night I visualize Tommy Gill’s last painting. Maybe it was a depiction of my future or his, a wash of black haphazardly brushed on the yellow manilla paper but I am just guessing.

  I have heard of the valley of death from ministers who work with the inmates. They speak of real death, not the living death I know and wait to outlive.

  Ten years ago George came to visit me. He said he knew the spot where Tommy had been found and visited it often. I asked George why he went back there. He shrugged and looked at his hands. He wouldn’t look me in the eye until he said what he came to say and even when he left he never glanced over his shoulder.

  No one, according to my brother, bothered to remove Tommy’s painting from the bough of the hemlock. It wasn’t entered into evidence. It wasn’t passed along to the boy’s mother as a keepsake. It was still there, marking the spot I was supposed to have done the terrible thing. The rain and snow poured down on it and it wept black tears. If it is still there, it moves lifelessly as the wind pleases and by now must have found something different to depict. Maybe it is a picture of time.

  Portrait

  When the New Mercer Asylum was abandoned after the building had been condemned for age, the portrait of Dr. Benham was left behind. The painting, considered a reasonable likeness of the doctor, is troubling. The eyes move. There is a look of superiority on the sitter’s face that says, “You are merely human and I am better than you.”

  Nailed high and mighty on the wall, the image seems to oversee even the slightest movement in the Refectory. The dining hall was the only room with ceilings high enough to accommodate the work’s enormity and keep it beyond the reach of vandals. When it was unveiled those who knew the doctor said he had finally reached the lofty heights he accorded himself in his own mind. The truth was that even after Benham died and New Mercer was abandoned no one wanted the portrait.

  Dr. Benham had no known relatives. His alma mater acquainted with his psychiatric practices refused it. The canvas depicted Dr. Benham in a white lab coat she never wore, preferring instead a green gardener’s coverall, a seldom-used stethoscope in the breast pocket, and his infamous black book clutched in his right hand.

  Benham considered himself a religious man, the hand of God, at least in his relationship with his patients. When someone under his treatment did not respond to the wet leather straight jacket that gradually dried and squeezed some sense into their heads, he would take the individual into the garden for a spiritual experience that included flagellation and crowns of thorns.

  The asylum was a high point on tours of the region’s abandoned buildings. The corridor walls and ceilings were shedding their plaster, and the relic that proved someone had entered the place was a tile from the pool room where the doctor insisted that difficult cases walk upon the waters even if they could not swim. Although his pronouncements and cures were kept strictly in-house, Dr. Benham had a theory that disorders were expressions of angelic possession. He was said to have cured an old man whose residency at New Mercer pre-dated his arrival in the late Forties. The man was drawing sigils in the dust on a window sill, and Mercer made similar unusual marks with his fingertip and the man smiled, and said, “You’re one of us.” Benham released the old man that day, fired the cleaning staff, and was present in a rotten orchard when the police cut down the former patient’s body.

  People who visited New Mercer tried their best to deface the portrait. They threw handfuls of fallen plaster at the uncanny stare when the eyes followed them around the empty hall. Nothing seemed to damage the painting. The Refectory doubled as an activity area. There was a rumor that one young man who Benham had deemed incorrigible was nailed to a cross there after breaking a loaf of bread into small pieces and feeding each patient. The young man told them they would be healed, and miraculously produced a bottle of wine and made each of the inmates drink from it. No one knew how the spirits had passed through security and when questioned the young man replied simply, “This is my blood given to you.”

  The beginning of the end came when the families of those who resisted Benham’s treatments began to question what had become of their kin. Benham stood before a regulatory board and insisted though his mansion, as he called New Mercer, had many rooms, it only had room enough for one king. Realizing the asylum was dilapidated and beyond repair and still bore all the hallmarks of the bedlams to which people had been consigned in the Nineteenth century, the decision was made to shutter New Mercer. There wasn’t money enough to tear it down.

  As for Dr. Benham, there was one rumor that circulated in town where he was an odd shadow who appeared and disappeared as if he was without substance, dwelling among the people but refusing to respond to their expressions of cordialities. Word spread that he was the doctor of souls who despised people, and despising them in their flesh, tortured the spirits that harbored within them. No matter how many angelic faces pass through the doors of psychiatric institutions, confused and confounded by the miseries of this world that run contrary to their way of dealing with reality, there will always be a Dr. Benham. Prophets drive the world to the verge of destruction but false prophets make sure catastrophe is fulfilled.

  Then, one day, he was gone. The police, lacking enthusiasm for Benham’s disappearance and investigating his whereabouts by only going through the motions found the doctor in the asylum garden. He was clutching a bag of silver half dollars as he dangled from the bough of an oak tree that had been struck repeatedly by lightning. From the appearance of what remained of the body, the tree must have been blasted while Benham dangled from it.

  Even in death his eyes bulged and appeared to move as those below him moved, just as they did in the painting, glaring at people with a look of superiority on his face. His black book in which he recorded the sins of his patients for future reference and surprise punishment had been stuffed in his mouth. He could have been mistaken in his long green gardener’s smock for a skein of moss though such things do not grow around New Mercer, and the sign into the town has been vandalized in anger or a warning to others. It reads Non-Miser, a joke scrawled by someone familiar with Latin, which in the context of the New Mercer Asylum translates as ‘there is misery here.’

  Rare Flower (Fiction North)

  Abebe wanted to be a poet. Poetry speaks of flowers, she told her mother who smiled and went back to preparing the wat. She wanted to give her voice to the meadows. The meadows were alive with flowers after the months of rain. The world was alive but it couldn’t tell anyone because no one had given it words to speak.

  When she was a small child, there was an old man who would sit in the shade of a large tree near the well and sing poems. There was nothing she would rather do than sit and listen to his voice. Her mother told her she was being useless and wasting her time, but the inflections rising and falling made her feel as if she was riding on the clouds.

  One day he asked her what her name was.

  “Abebe,” she answered. “It means rare flower.”

  “I know that,” said the old man. He began a song about a mountain flower that was more beautiful than any in the world. A young man sought it out, not to pluck it, but to lie down beside it and inhale its perfume. But to reach the flower on the mountain, the young man had to endure many trials and tests.

  Before the poem could end, the old man vanished.

  Long after the village had been torn apart by warring factions, and after her mother wandered off into the sand to find help for her young brother and never returned, and after the flies had closed his eyes, Abebe made her way to a camp where an Irishman bandaged her feet. He sent her to a place that was so cold the constant rain ate into her bones.

  Her teachers did not take her poetry seriously, especially when she wrote about a doll she owned. Her mother made it for her. The rag baby was dressed in flowers, and though it always appeared dead when someone else held it, Abebe knew it sang to her in whispers.

  “Do you still have it?” the teacher asked.

  “No,” she said as she wept. “Only its words.”

  Princess and Rick

  Rick was everything she wanted in a man. He was tall, caring, and compassionate. The look in his eyes and the depth in his voice said, “I’m the only one who can care for you.” He stroked her hair and called her Princess, and yet her parents were surprised when she announced she was moving out and going to live with Rick.

  She’d found a cozy apartment for herself and her beloved on the other side of the city – close enough to stay in contact with her parents but just that extra mile for her to live her dream life with Rick undisturbed. The first night together in their new place she decided to surprise him with her cooking skills. Lasagna was a specialty of hers. She bought into the adage that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach though she wondered if that were anatomically possible.

  But he didn’t want anything. He wasn’t hungry. The food sat on the plate and grew cold. Maybe some ingredient in the entrée put him off. He got up and left. The door slammed. She cried herself to sleep alone in their bed.

  Her mother phoned the next morning. They were close and always spent Saturday mornings together at the farmer’s market. Immediately, her mother detected there was something wrong with her daughter – a lump in the voice, a raspiness that suggested the young woman had been weeping. Mothers read emotional pain. But Rick’s Princess insisted everything was fine.

  On Sunday morning she was surprised by a knock at the door. Her mother was holding a bouquet and her father carried a basket of apples. She couldn’t turn them away even if they had arrived unannounced. She wanted the company even if she could not admit it.

  Her father excused himself and asked to use the washroom while mother and daughter sat on the couch, talking as if there was nothing wrong and life with Rick was going through a period of adjustment and would, eventually, be everything she dreamed if not more.

  Alone in the washroom, he noticed that only his daughter’s dressing gown hung on the hook behind the door. He opened the medicine cabinet. He didn’t want to pry but he was curious what kind of man Rick was. Was Rick a cheap aftershave guy who would splash an electric scent of blue liquid on his face and race to work or was his daughter’s ideal partner someone who indulged in expensive sandalwood cologne, a sure sign of extravagance and self-importance. He didn’t want his daughter to break her heart.

  But when he opened the medicine cabinet and scanned the shallow shelves for a razor or any sign of male presence there was nothing but two bottles – Aspirin and

  Midol. A lone pink toothbrush rested in a tumbler. His heart sank because he knew all perfect men eventually leave, and if they were perfect they may never have existed at all.

  How to Draw a Frog

  (Editor’s Prize, Edinburgh Flash Fiction Prize)

  Successful artists ensure the frog is not dead. A live frog adds a degree of verity to the drawing process. The artist must be quick to capture the impulsive movements of the subject. Frogs are easily distracted. Inert, docile amphibians are best but hard to find.

  Avoid dead frogs. They lack something, not just their lives. That goes without saying. They lose that glint in their eyes. They’re easier to work with but are specimens rather than subjects. The virescent depth of their green fades. If a frog is too dead the drawing is no longer of a frog but something returning to the mulch at the bottom of the pond. Such frogs aren’t satisfactory subjects.