Mario Lowther

Burrard View Park

Johnson enters Burrard View Park by the southwest corner, near the daycare center. Between the daycare and the tennis courts there’s a swath of scrub grass, strewn with dry maple buds and tiny twigs that crunch under Johnson’s black leather boots. The uneven ground rolls like a concealing carpet. This corner of the park is remote, yet the grass is cut, the swath tended. Manicured, but little used, little enjoyed.

Back at their dumpy little post-war home on Oxford Street, Johnson’s wife Annie has almost everything boxed, bagged, taped, strapped, and stacked. She and Johnson are moving, they’re leaving, they’re getting out, they’re free, they’re escaping the city. At last, they’re retiring to their cedar-shake cottage and cedar-post deck on point-six of an acre of tree-filled heaven three hours up the coast, where they intend to live comfortably and carefully on Annie’s modest government pension and whatever Johnson earns from the part-time job he desires at the village hardware outlet.

They say they won’t miss the city; it means they’ll miss the restaurants, there was always someplace to eat. Otherwise, it’s not the city they grew up in, hasn’t been a hometown for years. After one too many international facelift, it’s become a destination in a travel book, a site people scout out, transfer to, buy into, then flip. There was a time you could drive from point a to b and not encounter gridlock. There was a time when every square foot wasn’t taxed, metered or levied. A time the night fell sweetly silent and didn’t rock with gang shootings and serial killings. A time you could seek out your own small space, relax and think, watch time pass, hear the world glide, drink it in, contemplate life. There was a time when things would stay put.

It’s summer in the park; for Johnson it’s eternally autumn. Drawing his pea jacket around him, he wheezes cold air and bulls through a partition in the fence into the tennis court. The court is a skeleton, the netting gone, the lines faded, the asphalt as cracked and unreliable as a warped billiard table. He remembers when it was new, then on second glance it appears much better, and he’s halfway across the playing field when a ball whizzes past and he realizes there’s a game on. Two teenagers. One, snappily dressed in white, looks like he belongs, and has returned the ball expertly to his court mate. The other is some rock star wannabe wearing shades, a black tee-shirt and cut-off jeans, and swings his racket two-handed like a baseball bat, launching the ball over the fence into the alley. The players laugh, and snappy admonishes rock star to stop being a goof.

Johnson smiles sadly to himself and passes through. Exiting by another gap in the far corner of the court, he moves into the playground.

He stops to take in the view, his heart warming. It was a place of joy. Big toys grace a bed of green: to his left the toddler swing set, four worn wood teeter-totters, the monkey bars, and a sandbox, as much sand out as in; to his right, an old stone-and-mortar wading pool with a fountain that hasn’t flowed in years. Down from that, the big swing set; beyond a field, a tetherball pole, a box hockey game, and lawn darts kissing the ground like butterflies. At the end there’s a cottage: the park office, washrooms on one side, the caretaker’s tiny residence on the other, his fence around a few flowers, his Private sign on the gate. Although the flowers change each year, Johnson can’t recall ever seeing the caretaker. Tended by a ghost, he thinks, sighing.

Someone hurries past him, snaring his attention. A tall, long-haired, stick-like White boy, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, faded jeans, and a Dylan tee-shirt, flies toward a well-dressed, petite, pretty Chinese girl.

“I don’t want to lose you,” she declares, throwing her arms open as they meet, her father’s disapproval at her back.

Johnson fairly swoons. Her voice resounds with passion and regret, equal parts fever and storm. Johnson decides that she’s a young woman who has wrestled with logic and lost, that she knows she should run and never look back, yet her heart has compelled a reunion. She may never speak to anyone with such fervor again.

They embrace like survivors, and kiss brazenly in the open air of the park, as if to cue the roses to bloom, cartoon animals cavort, and minstrels play from the ashes of their vanquished love. Johnson stands nearby, admiring them. At last they break, and turn to him smiling.

“Do you wish this moment could last forever?” he asks.

They grin as though to say make us, and laugh. Then the kid hoists the girl into his arms, and steals her away from the playground, running wildly through the trees.

As they recede into the far end of the park, Johnson’s wistfulness fades, and there are children everywhere now. There’s a boy planted like an astronaut into one of the rubber seats of the small swing set, his fragile hands tugging the hanging chains, corkscrewing himself up, round and round to his tiptoes, then letting go to whirl back down. Another boy sits high atop the monkey bars, a king on a throne, arms akimbo, feet dangling. Another sits alone on the teeter-totter. One backhoes sand in the sandbox with his cupped hand, rrrr-ing sounds of heavy machinery. Another stands nearly up to his chest in the center deepest part of the wading pool, splashing back the screaming invaders of his hard-won territory.

You’re a brave one to hold down the deepest part of the pool, Johnson thinks, when the water is practically over your head. He grins at the boy, until the boy notices. Startled, and seemingly pleased to see an expression of approval from an adult, the boy grins back and waves. Johnson nods as if to tell him to keep up the good fight, then he goes to drink from the water fountain that hasn’t worked in years.

The hot summer breeze blows cold. Johnson rubs his hands, drives them into his pockets, and hugs his coat even more tightly around himself. This one thin layer of wool, he thinks, must be my armor. The couple have run off, out of sight around past the old juvenile hall. Worried about their happiness, Johnson follows after them, out of the playground and down a grassy slope to a gravel path lined with junior hawthorns and Japanese cedars, which runs in front of the building.

But it’s not a juvenile hall anymore, it’s a hospice, and the trees are adults. And Annie often jogs this path, Johnson remembers. He, too. Jogging helps keep them fit. Fitter than others their age. The imposing brick edifice of the hall is long gone, battered down, the smaller Tudor-style hospice grown out of it. The hall had a bathroom, Johnson recalls, with the saddest, vilest, most twisted graffiti he’d ever read and which he’d absorbed while his mother, brother and sister grappled in court.

Around back of the hospice, the hall is being demolished. A wall has toppled. A basement  office full of desks, chairs, paper and filing cabinets is exposed to the open air. Johnson has never seen an odder sight. Three teenagers ferret amongst the furniture, hunting for things to vandalize. A pimply kid in glasses finds a jug of something, sniffs it, curses and decants the contents. His friend flicks a lighter to see if it’ll catch. It does. Not greatly. But there’s smoke, and paper aflame on a desk, and they’re pleased. Laughing, they call it a tribute to all those who were captive here. Then they freeze at Johnson’s calm stare. The pimply kid has an edgy glare, fearful yet defiant, intelligent yet rash. Johnson doesn’t think he looks very tough. He looks like the kind who can’t resist risk, so will do it again and again until stopped.

“Do you expect this will make your mark?” Johnson asks.

The fire slowly spreads, but there’s nothing to add to it. Even odds says it goes out. Doesn’t matter - the point is that only Johnson has seen them. And it’s not their moment. The pimply kid shrugs at Johnson, a tacit why not? He and his friends clamber out of the rubble and lope off. Johnson stays and watches. The flame dies. The smoke remains. Johnson shrugs. It’s inevitable.

Something shrieks. Great wings in full spread, a bald eagle glides directly overhead, then swoops down across Wall Street into a Douglas fir bordering two houses. Johnson hurries to the edge of the park, eagerly scans the tree, spies two glowing white heads and a bucket-sized nest in the branches. He wonders if they have an egg up there. Like eagles, he and Annie will mate forever, but nature being fickle, they’ll likely tend their nest alone.

Sometimes he wishes things had worked out different. Growing up, he was self-absorbed, too irresponsible to consider fatherhood; that changed with Annie. Pragmatic, patient and loving, she would have made somebody a wonderful child, as she had made him a wonderful husband. It saddens him when she says it no longer bothers her and he jokes that with their busy lifestyle they would’ve wanted the kid to emerge from the womb seventeen and ready to leave home. Better to be eagles and to just keep going, keep trying, keep flying together, come what may.

Speaking of seventeen, Johnson searches this end of the park for the reunited lovers. Doesn’t see her. He does see him, head down like a bull, striding alone in a patch of midnight through a line of towering poplars. He wears a black leather jacket, wields a knife in one hand, a  bottle of rum in the other. If he thinks he isn’t asking for trouble, he isn’t avoiding it either. Maybe he hopes to see what he’s really made of. Maybe his footsteps are all he’s sure of. 

Concerned, Johnson follows him onto the big grass field. This green mesa is one-third of the park, one block long and half a block wide, sloping down from the playground to Wall Street. Poplars border one side; cedars, London plane and a sky-high oak edge the other. Annie walks their black lab, Polly, here; lets her off her leash to run with the pack of neighborhood dogs. On the afternoon of Christmas Day, Johnson had counted two dozen dogs in packs according to size. Their owners, strangers all, smiled.

The young boy who sat alone on the monkey bars is with a group of neighborhood kids, sliding down the slope to Wall Street on sheets of cardboard cut from boxes. In winter they’ll  use trash can lids. He shoots right out into the middle of Wall Street. It’s okay, there’s no traffic  coming. His eyes glow with excitement as the kids celebrate; he went farther than anyone else. The younger kids applaud him. The older kids berate him. Stop trying to show off, be careful, if you’d gotten hurt we’d all be in trouble. He grins as though he has amounted to something.

Johnson stands alone on the field, hugging himself against the summer chill, kicking at a twig, in a bit of a sulk. The moment these kids are having, it’s nothing, it’s a thought in passing, a leaf in a hurricane, gone forever before you realize to who knows where. You might as well search the beach for a particular grain of sand. But if it means nothing, what’s the point in living it?

It hurts too much to hear their voices echoing off the sky. Johnson spins away, and sees the boy who defended the center of the swimming pool playing baseball, with what appears to be every kid for ten square miles plugging up the diamond in hope of becoming a hero. There’s the swing and a solid crack of the bat. The boy takes off on furious feet down a well-worn base path. The ball bounds over outstretched hands, evades colliding bodies. The boy rounds first. The ball, with a mind of its own, skips past short into the outfield. The boy rounds second. The ball rolls to Johnson, who stands in the deepest part of the park. He picks up the ball. He intends to toss it back harmlessly to the nearest kid. He sees the boy halfway between second and third, running all-out, but slowing, apparently not a good runner, not much stamina. Something base, latently cruel and coldly logical, kicks in. As the boy rounds third, Johnson squints, takes aim, and fires a missile straight at the catcher, who waits at home plate. It’s a stellar throw; Johnson is proud. But in mid-air, the ball changes flight, sputters with as much as it ever had on it, and dying drops into twenty bobbling arms between short and the mound. The boy lumbers across home plate – breathless, fists raised, to a few cheers, more laughter – ahead of a last-ditch throw from the field that sails over everybody and thuds off the backstop. Home run!

It’s the end of the inning, and the teams change sides. Overjoyed, his smile unquenchable, the boy trots up to Johnson in the outfield.

“Do you think you’ll ever hit one without help?” Johnson asks.

The boy runs right past, without a glance. Another kid his age joins him. There’s a family resemblance; they’re the same wiry build, the same height for now. They make a beeline for a pair of adolescent cypress trees in the corner of the field with ladder-like branches perfect for climbing. Up they clamber, highest they’ve ever been on their own, to the top of their world, where they sit and discuss confrontations at school and on the street, the changes, reported in the news and by parents, coming down from the war and this peace movement thing, and what it all means. They pretend to be in the thick of it, fighter pilots launching tree-to-tree cypress bud bombs, making blow-up noises, counting hits, laughing, and trying not to fall.

They climb down, and Johnson is mistaken, it’s not the young boy from the pool and the baseball diamond with the kid he looks related to, it’s the pimply kid and the lighter kid from the back of the juvenile hall. They wear leather jackets and long unkempt hair. Cigarettes hang from their lips. As they stride past the hall, a fist shatters a top floor window, middle finger raised, and a wild voice bellows fuck you!

They respond with identically raised fingers. Again –  now it seems forever  – in a patch of midnight, they make for the playground and park themselves side-by-side in the big swing set. All around them the dark neighborhood keeps a wary distance. Only Johnson dares approach, unseen in shadow. There’s a spark and the air turns thick and sweet. Back and forth the spark is passed, along with a bottle of warm rum and Coke. The conversation is highly intelligent, raw emotion: how this felt, that felt; is pure impression: what this meant, that meant. Is profane, defiant, arrogant, sarcastic, sexual, and tuned to the moment. Johnson savors it as the language of raconteurs and rebels, of philosophers, of teenage kings.

Hey, look over there, says lighter to pimples, aiming the spark at the silhouettes of three similarly-dressed males prowling up the street. At the top of his lungs he shouts fuck off. Their heads turn. Nobody gets away with that shit. Inspired, they proceed into the park.

Whattaya doin’? pimply kid growls, nervous. There’s more ’a them than us.

Lighter kid shrugs, passes the spark back. So what? We’ll fight ‘em.

Turns out they know each other; they’re all friends. The tension evaporates, and Johnson is relieved. They pass the spark, pass the bottle. Whattaya doin’? Nuthin’. Whatta you doin’? Fuck all. Goin’ home? Fuck that. Got drugs? Fuckin’ not enough. Know where there’s more. Oh yeah? Yeah. C’mon, let’s get wasted. They leave together, a midnight posse, the night young. Anyone passing on the street will give them space, loath to discover their capabilities.

Johnson knows what they’re capable of. He takes their place in the big swing set. Grasps the chains, slowly pushes off, swings forward, glides back. Feels like floating on air, remembers this breath of freedom. Squints up into a cold summer sun in a hot summer sky, and thinks about putting one foot after the other, reaching a fork in the road, and choosing. So many forks, so many roads, and so many choices, good and bad. But in the end all his paths led him to Annie.

A chain squeaks. Johnson turns, gazes into this midnight at the kid with the leather jacket and the bottle and the knife who sits in the swing seat beside him. The kid has aged a lot in a short time. He wears a grim, thousand-yard stare, that youthful glory stomped out of him. He knocks his bottle back, lights a cigarette, sighs, the sound sad and lonely – the kind of sound someone makes when his girl has gone, his family are idiots, his few friends wouldn’t understand, tomorrow won’t be any better, so perhaps he should go back and try once again to end it all. His steel-toed boots are soaking wet, water dripping from the laces.

Beyond the park, the trees and houses of Wall Street, and the waterfront and its hypnotic omnipresent hum, the choppy waves of Burrard Inlet glisten in the afternoon sun. Two freighters criss-cross like gigantic. rusty busses. A speedboat zips between them. It makes Johnson want to take up boating. He thinks of Annie, back home, wrapped up, ready to go, and waiting for his return. He finds that the older he gets, the more he appreciates survivors. He reaches out, feels the bottle placed in his hand. With a wry smile, he takes a long, satisfying swig of memory, and hands the bottle back. His last thought, as he gets up from the swing seat, is that he wishes someone had taken a picture of the sky-high oak years ago so he could see how far it has grown.

---

Mario Lowther lives on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia in a little village half an hour from the nearest traffic light. His literary and genre short fiction has appeared in over a dozen publications, including The Lorelei Signal, Imaginarium, Books 'n Pieces, Corner Bar Magazine, Collideoscope, and confetti, and a weird fiction, pre-apocalyptic, pseudo political novel is undergoing polishing. This, and his ongoing publishing credits, continue to help convince his goodly wife that he's not just upstairs in the attic goofing off.

J.W. Wood

A Wild Horse on Leith Walk

I stopped for a drink on the way home from my father’s funeral. And that’s when I saw him – Scotland’s most famous man.

He looked older than in that last film he’d shot before retiring: timid somehow, meagre of face, hunched over the paperback he was reading. He wore half-moon glasses and an open-necked shirt. A pint of beer sat on the bar in front of him, flecks of foam down the half-drunk glass.

Despite his unkempt appearance, I knew it was him. And I doubted I had the strength, on that sad day, to tell him about our connection, a connection between him and my family that went back before his fame, before his money. Though I’d never met him, I knew about his life before he’d left Scotland to find his fortune – a life he’d shared, for a brief time, with my dead father.

I had to find my courage. I stepped up to the bar and ordered a double gin and tonic. The man didn’t look up from his book, the bald patch on his head larger than it appeared in photographs. I glanced briefly to my left, checking his scalp for the birthmark that would establish this man beyond doubt as Scotland’s most famous actor.

Once I’d spotted that birthmark and taken hold of my drink, all I had to do was speak. I smoothed down my skirt and made sure my necklace was straight. Then I took a pace towards him – and two bodyguards got up from a table by the window as I approached…

***

Edinburgh,1950. A city recovering from war. A city where rationing still ruled: the only hints of the indulgence that would explode ten years later found in the Balmoral Hotel or the Empire Ballroom on Lothian Road. The tram system, the original one, still operated between Haymarket and Princes’ Street – the second-richest street in the British Empire. The war was won, King George sat on the throne, and the air thrummed with optimism and the sleeves-rolled-up spirit of a nation being rebuilt.

Three miles away from the glamour of Jenners Department Store and the Café Royale lay the Britannia Dairies yard in Leith. You might not include horses and carts in your vision of the fifties, but they were still in use: great huge Shires and Clydesdales, pulling goods up and down Edinburgh’s cobbled streets, living reminders of a way of life disappearing fast.

Dad would tell me how you’d cross the dairy yard, preparing to take the milk dray out in the half-light of some freezing morning, when you’d hear a sound like cascading water. Only it wasn’t water – it was the sound of a horse voiding its bowels, pissing and shitting into the straw. He might not have had the best job back then, but at least he’d never had to muck out the stables.

After leaving school, Dad became a dray-boy at the Britannia Dairies. That meant riding on the back of the milk cart and picking orders as they were shouted out by the drayman, then running the deliveries to doorsteps on both sides of the street. He’d leave the orders outside in the chilly morning, waiting for the housewives to pick them up: milk, cream, eggs, yoghurt, orange juice. On Fridays, Dad would pick up the envelopes filled with the money owing and hand it to the drayman. At Christmas and Easter there were tips for them both.

My father was christened Thomas, known to all as Tommy. Although blessed with intellect, he never had a chance with formal education. His own father, a carriage-painter traumatised by his time in the infantry, made sure of that. When Dad came home from Leith Academy with the news he’d come top in Latin, my grandfather punched him in the face and told him not to get any ideas. Two weeks later, he’d signed on to work at the dairies.

His partnership with his drayman made life bearable. Six years older than Tommy, his drayman was another Thomas, nick-named “Big Tam” to distinguish him from “Wee Tommy.” Known around the milk yard by the epithet “Big Tam and Wee Tommy,” they made an unlikely pair: wee Tommy the eager school leaver of fourteen, and Big Tam, all of twenty but already famous in the streets and bars of Edinburgh and Leith.

Four years before, at sixteen, Big Tam passed a trial with Glasgow Rangers Football Club, then one of Europe’s finest, but turned them down in favour of two years’ National Service in the Navy. On his return to Edinburgh, Big Tam started lifting weights instead of playing football and that very year, 1950, had won the Central Scotland Prize for Physical Culture. The spiciest rumour about Big Tam, and the one that made wee Tommy look up to him more than anything, was the whisper that he’d beaten up a gangster and five of his men in the toilets of the Empire ballroom. Apparently the gangster’s girlfriend took a shine to Big Tam, and the gangster wanted him humiliated. Too bad for the gangster.

As a boy, my father was slight and studious. He’d been saved from tuberculosis by the generosity of a local doctor in the days before the NHS. He suffered at school, though he never told me about it. What a pair they must have been – Big Tam with the world at his feet, a muscular God whose thick black hair and dark complexion marked him as an icon about to rise; and my Dad by his side, wee Tommy: the most ordinary boy.

For Big Tam, this job as a drayman was about getting more money in: when he wasn’t working at the yards, he’d be lifting weights, posing for Art Students at the Edinburgh College of Art, or reading. Dad said that was what he remembered most about Big Tam, apart from his smile and good looks: he was always reading.

They say that when Big Tam was world-famous, he came back to Edinburgh to accept an award. Before the ceremony, he asked his limousine driver for a tour of Leith Walk. Big Tam stunned the driver by reciting every street name from top to bottom as they drove down – then did the same thing on the other side as they drove back up the Walk. After sixty years, he still remembered every detail of his milk-round. And no wonder, given what happened next.

***

As usual, Dad must have risen at around four o’clock in the morning, washed his hands and face, got dressed, and walked the half-mile to the Britannia yards. It was an autumn morning like any other in Edinburgh, then or now: grey and drizzly, no sunrise as such, just a gradual lifting of the gloom until the different shades of grey outside announced themselves as streets and buildings.

When he got to the dairy yard, he met Big Tam outside, smoking a cigarette and reading a book under the streetlight outside the entrance to the yards. They knocked up the night watchman to let them in, then the boys who were readying the dray handed the order sheet to Big Tam. Big Tam stepped up to the buggy-chair at the front of the dray, looking behind him to make sure the order had finished loading and wee Tommy was on the back. Then he shook the reins and coaxed the horse out of the yard on to Constitution Street, ready to start their shift with a delivery to the British Railways’ staff room at the station at the lower end of Leith Walk.

Dad said he was never sure if Big Tam had been drinking or in a fight, but he seemed sluggish that morning. Maybe he’d spent the night with that gangster’s girlfriend. Whatever the case, Dad remembered Big Tam wasn’t himself, forgetting orders and snapping at him where normally he was the model of kindness.

Halfway through their shift, as they reached the corner of Smith’s Close, Big Tam cursed.

“Tommy! We’ll be late if we keep so fuckin’ slow an’ they’ll dock our wages. And the last thing I want is docked wages.”

“Right Tam.”

“Listen son. I’ll give ye three orders for the shops on the Walk. I’ll do the orders on Smith’s Close myself. Here’s the order sheet. And look sharp, all right? If you’re quick, I’ll tell ye what I got up to last night.”

Then he winked, one thick comma of eyebrow rising into his forehead. I can imagine Dad giggling, wanting to please his hero, a man who would become hero to hundreds of thousands less than ten years later.

Big Tam got off the buggy and came to the back of the dray. He doled out three orders from the crates and put them on one side of the dray’s back shelf for Dad to deliver.

“Number 294 for that first one; 297 for the second; and the eggs and juice for that Eyetie Restaurant across the street at 300. Got it?”

Dad remembered Big Tam taking five orders out of the crates and gathering them in his arms, ready to head further up the Walk to deliver them and save some time. Dad wasn’t sure if it was the irregularity of Big Tam getting off the buggy and doing the orders, or the weather, or the fact that Tam had been shouting – anyway, their horse, a huge Shire called Bluebell, turned skittish.

Like all drays, Bluebell wore blinkers to stop her getting frightened by the cars and buses they encountered on Leith Walk. Blinkers work fine – as long as you’re guiding the horse and looking after it. The moment the horse thinks it’s going to be left like that, it panics.

And that’s exactly what happened. To the last day of his life, Dad remembered the sight of that huge horse, nineteen hands if she was an inch, rearing into the sunlight that rose above the top of Leith Walk. Dad had walked halfway up the side of the dray-horse when it reared, about to cross the Walk to deliver juice and eggs to the Italian restaurant. Meanwhile Big Tam was closer – he’d been running to and fro, picking out fresh orders and delivering them at a sprint along Leith Walk.

Dad would always tell me there was no way Big Tam could have seen it coming. He was running too fast. Bluebell had just reached the top of her rear, legs flailing, the whites of her eyes showing, nostrils flaring. Anything in Bluebell’s way when those hooves came down stood no chance. And Big Tam was in the way.

With no time to think, Dad dived to the front of the dray and pulled down on the wooden coupling that bound Bluebell’s harness to the cart. As Bluebell’s huge body dropped downwards, she lurched forward and the unhitched cart rolled backwards down Leith Walk, eggs, milk and orange juice smashing and crashing off the cobbles, rivers of white and orange and yellow streaming into the gutters.

“You daft wee bugger!” Big Tam shouted. “Ye’ll get us sacked!”

Dad looked up and down Leith Walk. He later told me he had wanted to cry so much he couldn’t find the tears. Then Big Tam calmed down a little. I imagine Dad’s face turned red, his slender hands gripping the sides of his leather work apron with nerves. Big Tam breathed in, then smiled.

“It’s all right, son. I know why you did it. I’d have been crushed if Bluebell landed on me.”

Then Big Tam held out his hand for my Dad to shake with a smile.

“I owe you my life, Tommy. Now, I know what to tell the bosses.”

Then Big Tam explained where he’d been the night before – at an audition in York, for a part in the chorus-line of Gilbert and Sullivan’s South Pacific. The production was going to tour provincial theatres in Britain. Big Tam found out straight away that he’d got the job, and took a few drinks on the train back up to Edinburgh the night before by way of celebration.

“So that’s why I’m a bit the worse for wear the day”, Tam concluded. “But I’d have been buggered if that bastard horse had fallen on me – and you stopped her. So listen – we’ll go back to the Yard, I’ll take the blame, then hand in my notice. I don’t need their stinking job anyway.”

Then Big Tam picked Dad up like a baby and hugged him. “Don’t think I’ll ever forget this, son. If you ever need anything from me, just get in touch, right? You’ll know where to find me.”

My father, ecstatic as only small boys can be at a moment of communion with their hero, nodded in agreement – even though he’d no idea where Big Tam lived, or how to get in touch. The fact that the man he worshipped was in his debt was enough for him.

***

Sixty-five years passed. Sixty-five years that saw Big Tam change his name and become one of the world’s greatest movie stars. Dad went on to live a life of quiet dignity, giving up his work in the drinks business to help Mum set up a care home. If Big Tam lived his dreams – and everyone else’s besides – my Dad never got to become the pilot he’d dreamed of becoming. Even if he’d lived a love story few could dream of with my mother, lived to see his only child grown up, and married, and become a mother herself – his own ambitions remained unrealised.

And now he was dead, and I stood before the world-famous man Dad saved from certain death six decades before.

I took a step towards Big Tam (as I knew him), coughed politely, and spoke:

“Excuse me. My father was your dray-boy at Britannia Dairies in 1950.”

The two bodyguards were on me in an instant.

“I’m sorry madam. No personal contact or photographs. Would you please come this –”

“Just a minute.”

That voice from behind the bodyguards. The voice known to tens of millions around the world from the films, the books, the talk shows, the exposés. The voice that made men envious and women tremble.

“It’s all right. Step back, the pair of you.”

With that, the bodyguards retreated to their table by the window and I was left face to face with him.

“So you’re Tommy Smith’s daughter.”

I nodded, and he put his book down.

“He was a good man. A hard worker. How is he now?”

I told him Dad died the week before, and he glanced at his drink.

“I’m sorry for your loss. I always remembered him.”

He paused, then smiled. The smile that had captivated millions, that eyebrow, now flecked with grey, still cutting into the lines on his forehead.

“May I buy you a drink?”

I was being offered a drink by the man women of my generation grew up dreaming about. A man from the same streets as my Dad, the same working-class background, the same blind alley of zero opportunity and Scottish hard-man tradition. Of beaten faces and hands broken in the punch. And Dad’s bravery had enabled this man to live a life no one I knew would dare to dream of living.

I noticed the bodyguards were getting more twitchy the longer I stayed in his presence. Not to mention the other bar patrons, who by now realised the true identity of the grizzled old man reading quietly at the bar. I felt my eyes prick with tears.

“Thank you for your kind offer. My father always remembered working with you and how kind you were to him. But I have to go now, I’m afraid. My children are waiting.”

He smiled and shook my hand, then bid me farewell. I left the bar and went to my car outside the hotel. And I cried – for my father, for what might have been, and for fate, that lifts some of us up only to leave others stranded in worlds they never dreamed of and cannot understand, like a horse rearing in sunlight that longs to hit the ground.

~

In memory of Thomas James Smith (1936-2016) and Jean "Sheena" Smith (1937-2020)

---

J.W. Wood's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Cat Mystery Magazine (US), Idle Ink (UK), God's Cruel Joke (US), and Ars Humanita (UK). Last year, stories were anthologised in the US, UK and Canada. Wood is the author of five books of poems and a novel, all published in the UK between 2006 and 2019; and the forthcoming novella, By Any Other Name (Terror House Press, US, 2023). He is the recipient of awards from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. For more, please visit www.jwwoodwriter.com

Keily Blair

Expectations on Sunbury Avenue

We ride our bikes down Dead Man’s Hill, wind whipping around us as we build speed. Our hearts beat behind our bones with the desperate flutter of hummingbird wings. We like to pretend we have the guts to ride faster and faster, but we always slow as we approach the tiny triangular patch of shrubs and grass at the end of the street.

Whoever waits the longest to brake is the bravest. We usually give in long before reaching the “Little Triangle,” right when the wind is roaring in our ears. After making the sharp turn, we glide over the asphalt, trailing one behind the other, laughing and grinning with the rush of adrenaline. The street’s sign looms over us, proudly declaring our quiet patch of suburbia “Sunbury Avenue.”

***

My neighbor, Adam, brings out his ramp—a small piece of black plastic his dad bought for him to attempt jumps with his bike. My knees are unmarred as I line up to have a try on our shaded street. It’s such a slight ramp and the airtime is brief but oddly satisfying before my balance shifts and I slam into the asphalt, bike falling on top of me. The pain is hot, intense, but my playmates—Adam and my younger sister, Barbara—are watching, so I burst into manic laughter. Embarrassed, I manage to stand and limp into my family’s driveway, blood streaming down my leg from a large scrape, later a pale scar I carry into adulthood. I refuse to cry, knowing my companions, both younger than me by two years, are watching. As the oldest, I am tough. I watch over them, not the other way around.

***

We watch the teenage boy, Daniel, who lives across the street with his grandmother, perform tricks on his skateboard. Because he is older, he will never play with us. Instead, he shows off and we whisper in awe. He is handsome though seems to never smile. Dark hair, dark eyes. He’s rather pale despite the time he spends riding his skateboard, protected by the shade of Sunbury Avenue. His grandmother waves at us from her seat on her porch, smiling.

***

I am seven when my mom gathers my sister and me into her room, her voice a soft whisper as she tries to explain what has happened. The boy across the street murdered his grandmother. I try to conjure the image of her, or some shred of sadness for the event, not knowing my mind will struggle with such things for years. My thoughts will always be grayscale and distant; my strong empathy will always be hard to tap into without self-taught coping mechanisms. Instead of crying, I ask how he did it. My mom opens her mouth, truth and fiction warring in her expression. Finally, she opts for the truth.

“He beat her with a fire poker,” she says.

The knowledge doesn’t spark the feelings I crave to have. There will be whispers for a while among the adults, acknowledgments of Daniel’s “troubled” behavior. I will remember the boy on his skateboard and struggle to connect him to the bloodthirsty killer in the news for the next two decades.

But at this moment, I feign fear and sadness, trying to become what is expected of me.

***

We know the neighbors on our street by their houses. In our way, we know the woman with the noisy Shetland sheepdogs at the top of the hill. She often waves as her dogs streak across the yard until the knowledge of the invisible fence halts their progress, yapping.

To my family’s left live the Martins, an elderly couple who always give out homemade popcorn balls on Halloween.

To the right live Adam’s family, another four-person suburban family with two giant mastiffs and a trampoline where we lost countless hours behind a private fence.

Across the street and to the right lived Randy. We ride our bikes by his house, cracking jokes about his silly, drunken antics.

***

I watch Randy sing along to some pop hit, eyes closed in rapture. He sits on our porch, invading my home with his existence. Even at eight, I know something is wrong with him. There’s something undesirable in the way he slurs and stumbles about, the way my mom defends his behavior.

I hate him.

It’s a child’s understanding of hatred—glaring at the man as he walks by and whispering jokes at his expense with Adam and Barbara. My mom’s unlikely friendship with him is shadowed by the suspicion something is going on, something secret and slimy.

It will be nearly twenty years before I learn he gave her pills, fueling addiction, stealing her from me.

***

We ride into the driveway with the painted mailbox – the one with the dolphins, sun, moon, and stars, a day mingling into night. The garden is the most beautiful on the street, carefully tended. Patches of snapdragons, bleeding-hearts, irises, sunflowers, pansies, and more, rotating throughout the year and dependent on the season. Giant rosemary bushes, tiny sprigs of thyme, and patches of sage fill the spaces between. While Barbara and Adam ride in the driveway, I tuck a piece of sage between my teeth, run my fingers over the soft fuzz of a lamb’s ear.

The porch is a deep blue marred by golden footprints, the product of one of my mom’s many crafting ventures featuring my sister and me. My mom is a gifted artist and gardener. There’s not a garden, porch, or mailbox like ours in the entire neighborhood, and pride wells in my chest.

Adam heads home, leaving my sister and me to walk the steps leading to our front door. The sun, maybe not at its highest, is still high at two in the afternoon. Dad’s not home yet, and he won’t be until it’s nearly bedtime. The coke he drinks out of Styrofoam cups will likely be supplemented with what my sister and I refer to as “the yucky stuff,” and if it’s not, he’ll be sure to bring some home in a brown paper bag. We’ve taken to sniffing his cups before trying to steal sips of sweet soda, wary of the sharp odor.

The house is silent.

I open the door to my parents’ bedroom, where my mother has slept all day, sedated by pills I won’t know she takes until years later. I stare at her breathing form for a moment before shutting the door.

Part of me is anxious we’ll have visitors. She scolded me last time I answered the door for a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses when Barbara and I were home alone. Am I allowed to answer the door now, while she is sleeping?

“I’m hungry,” Barbara says.

There’s a smile on my face when I retrieve a pack of hot dogs from the fridge, using the microwave like a big kid. The juice is trickier because the bottles are so heavy when full that my hands shake when I hold them over the cups. Cherry for her, apple for me. The liquid sloshes, but I manage to keep a firm grip. I squeeze a single line of ketchup over my sister’s hot dog.

I am eight years old when I take hold of my sister’s lunch and sit her down at the breakfast nook in our kitchen. We turn on the TV and wait for Mom to wake up.

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Keily Blair (they/them) is an autistic and queer writer. They hold a BA in English: Creative Writing from UT Chattanooga, where their nonfiction won the Creative Nonfiction Award. Their fiction has appeared in publications such as The Dread Machine, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Etherea, and The Vanishing Point. They are currently at work on their debut novel. You can find more details about their work at www.keilyblair.com or follow them on Twitter @keily_blair. They live in Tennessee with their husband, dog, cat, and guinea pigs.