Kings of Nowhere

By Patrick de Moss

In this collection of darkly magical short stories, Patrick de Moss grounds speculative fantasy in a more psychological, complex world - and does so to stunning effect. In "The Sweet Shepherd" a man incapable of dying and living in Connecticut hires a chauffeur, and comes in close contact with the unmitigated sorrow of loss. In "Like Clockwork" a lonely accountant discovers a man of bronze and brings him back to life, only to see the pain he carries with him from her act of kindness. In "A Strange Boy", Nicholas must decide the fate of a childhood friend - a moment that may in many ways save or end his own life. In each case, de Moss hones in on the small victories and losses of ordinary people trying to survive in a world that only rarely needs them. Reminiscent of the spirit of Charles de Lint and Guillermo Del Toro's "Pan's Labryinth" de Moss' debut is a meditation on isolation as the stories weave together to create a vivid tapestry and a unified, though broken whole. His stories delve deeply into the very nature of what it means to try to be human, exploring our fears, triumphs, tragedies and the heartache that comes along with the reality - and our perceptions of reality - of the gulf that exists between another and ourselves. As thought provoking as it is arresting, "Kings of Nowhere" is a transformative collection, keenly aware of the pulse of life and the desire within us all for a place to feel needed and welcome.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrick de Moss
• Release date: Oct 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301482177

Patrick de Moss

Born in Nova Scotia, and having held any number of odd jobs, from Hotline Psychic to Gravedigger, Patrick de Moss has always been writing. Or trying to avoid writing. A playwright, poet, and occasional prose writer, he feels somewhat uncomfortable talking about himself in the third person, and oft times relies on humour to save himself from being embarassed. This is one such time.

Book preview

Kings of Nowhere

Published by Patrick de Moss at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Patrick de Moss

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For Tanya, who believed in me, and in this piece, even when I didn’t.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Possession

A Strange Boy

Dizzy Miss Kitty and her Death-Defying Act

Like Clockwork

The Sweet Shepherd

What Happened On The Road

The Firesale

What Stayed on the Road

Angels of Mercy

Epilogue: Dawn of a Particular Day

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This has been a long time in coming. In a lot of ways, far too long, and there are about a million people I want to thank, but I’ll try to be as brief as possible.

First of all, a lot of the nice clean script you’ll be reading is coming to you in no small part because of two wonderful editors. Lee Burton, of Ocean’s Edge Editing, who went through each and every story in here with a fine toothed (and fine formatted) comb, and Jay Howard, who took time out of her very busy writing schedule and GoodReads moderating to pick over what Lee or I might have missed. The book could not have come to you as polished as it is without their help, their insight, and encouragement.

Speaking of encouragement (and not to be forgotten) Mark Bell, another fantastic author took the time to send a few words (and wrote a marvelous review to boot) that were in equal parts praise and kick in the pants. I hope the kick has sent the book in the right direction.

I want to thank Floriana Barbu, for allowing me to use her work Autumn no. 2 as the cover art for this book. I honestly don’t think I could have found, or asked someone to make a piece that worked so well with what I wanted to do here.

There is a story in here The Sweet Shepherd that is due in no small part to a long conversation I had with playwright Daniel Goldberg. If he sees that conversation in there, I would be so very happy, and if he enjoys what came out of that long-winded Undyne conversation, so much the better.

Angels of Mercy is a sequel (of sorts) to a play called La Bella Luna, and I would be terribly remiss if I didn’t take time to thank the cast of that venerable (and rather long-winded) piece for bringing it to light at one point far in the past. If it hadn’t been for their work, I don’t think I would ever have seen what happened to Ben and Thom and everyone else afterwards.

To my wife, for whom the book is dedicated, who heard every story long before anyone else knew what was there, I can’t say bless you, or thank you enough.

My mother-in-law, Pearl Harris, who sent me her own extremely helpful editing notes, as well as so much praise, and assistance over the last few years that I don’t think I will ever be able to say thank you enough.

And one last note, though everyone else in my life I would like to thank (and will, Ma, if I finish the next book sometime this side of forever) Don’t worry – I’m sure I will need to thank you for a million things along the way, as well as the million things you’ve done already but tempis fugit, and there’s a book that follows, and I’m self-indulgent, but only so much.

My last note is for my father. I spend endless hours trying to think of things to say to you. But, I guess, just saying – ‘last but not least, my father’ should be enough. I hope you can see where I got to from where we last met.

Vancouver

October 12, 2013

.

Possession

I was born in…

This is the place people go when…

Oh God, where do I start?

If I could say this starts anywhere, it started with the photos. The ones I took. The ones Amber took. The ones other people took, that I found and took from them. The two years before Elliot came back were my magpie years, a scavenger season. I made nests out of pictures. They were hidden under my records, under the bed, stuffed into dresser drawers behind shirts and socks. And then, two months ago, it was as if a wind picked up, scattering all my little nests, my hiding places of the past, and I left them to yellow and to rot. A slowly disintegrating flip book of Amber smiling, walking, dancing, aging, that played out over my desk and walls.

Amanda (God bless you, wherever you are) never found them. Or maybe she did. It doesn’t matter. I am sorry, though, if you came across them and wondered what it all meant. Or worse, if you knew.

What does it mean?

Which came first? The chicken or the photos? The flip book or the accident? Elliott walking into the bar or the wind that whirled through all that sepia and film?

Where do I start?

Document A:

A photograph. A young woman sitting in Peace Park. The park slopes downhill towards the river. Throughout are chip bags, and in the upper left a small cluster of beer cans, crushed and fading, all of it scattered about like leaves from strange trees. The young woman is off-centre. She is sitting on a blanket. Her hair is… is blonde in this picture. Bleach blonde (the roots are beginning to show, if you look closely enough) and there is henna around her eyes like a weeping tattoo. She is, however, smiling. She is wearing long gloves (black) and a white dress, and there are gold sparkles in the dress, on her cheeks. Her Doc Martens are polished so that they shine in the sunset.

It is sunset and fall in this photo. The proof of autumn is in the colour of the light as it hits the grass, the leaves sharing space with the trash all around. It is fall in this picture that I took three years ago (four years ago? God, longer?). It was a long time ago. But it is in the fall, and that was our favorite time of year.

The details. The details are very important. She was beautiful and the details prove it. Her blonde hair. The dress. These are the particulars that made up Amber. The way she is smiling in this picture is proof of that beauty. That tired smile. We were all smiling tiredly three years ago. A sign of our jaded world-weariness.

This is before. This is all in the before.

Oh God, where do I start?

Two months ago a man walked into a bar.

Elliott had been off the radar, out of radio range for two years. No one knew where he’d gone. They’d actually ask me if I knew anything, had heard anything. His mother once stopped me in the supermarket, her hand on my arm. We thought of calling the police, she said, and I bit my lip and couldn’t really answer. All I could say was, Away. He just has things to sort out… y’know? And her eyes kept pushing into my head, looking, searching for guilt, a shift of my gaze. But there was nowhere I could look, because I didn’t know.

I honestly had no idea. He never said a word about where he was going. He hadn’t really said much right after the funeral, only one more. And that was over and over again.

This was the week after the funeral. I would come in to open the bar at ten, so the dedicated drinkers (like him, like me) wouldn’t feel so ashamed about putting one back too early in the morning. He’d already be sitting on the pavement outside the door, still in his suit, staring down into the sidewalk and only getting up once he heard the lock click, not even bothering to brush the dirt or the butts off his pinstriped pants. He’d follow right behind me and sit at the bar, facing the door, but he wouldn’t look up when the little bell above it rang: he wasn’t waiting for anyone. He’d sit, eyes half-lidded, and trace a circle over and over on his coaster, and drink. And drink.

When I closed up around two in the morning, when Bernie Cullen would yell out, ! Everyone the fuck out! he’d still be sitting there. I would have to touch his shoulder, nudge him, and he’d follow me out. He would just stand outside the door, looking up the street while all the last callers tried to hook up or find a house party. And he wouldn’t talk to anyone, though after a few days no one even wanted to try. The next morning he’d be sitting there again, and the only thing he’d say to me was one more.

As his shirt got more and more yellow, as he started to stink, you’d think someone would ask him to leave. But no one wanted to stick their nose into his business. And money was money. And he’d just lost his girlfriend (fiancé? had they gone that far?) and maybe (just maybe) I was to blame a little for that. So I did what I could and kept out of it, and I thought he’d snap out of it somehow, and just… talk.

And then he did. This was on the seventh day, just after the lunch rush, and it was just him and me in the bar. He drained his beer and fixed his tie, the limp and smoke-curled lapels of his pinstriped jacket, and I thought he was going to ask for one more, but he looked up, right into my eyes, and I thought, Oh Jesus, here it comes. Because it wasn’t my fault. Not exactly. But I didn’t want to say, didn’t want to talk about it. I still didn’t want to even think about it, the last time I had been by his house and he wasn’t there but Amber was. Because it wasn’t my fault what had happened. But he knew (and I knew) that maybe it was, if only just a little bit.

He looked me in the eyes, and I gripped the back of the bar and got ready, but what he said was, Gotta get going, Brian.

And that was it. He looked at me and waited. So I said, Guess so. ’Cause, Jesus, I didn’t know what to say.

And he nodded, and turned around and walked out the door, and that was that. He went away. The police came in and asked questions, his landlord asked questions, his mother put her hand on my arm and probed and asked questions, but I didn’t know. He went away, and that’s all.

Where was he? What had he been doing? Between the day he left in his funeral clothes and the first day back in the bar was a long dreadful space full of missing posters, missing person reports and interviews. But in the whole month that I had been with him, standing near him, trying not to smell him once he got back, I never found out, and I’m afraid to know.

For me those two years were a dead season, a season that rotted walls, that turned food and cigarettes and beer to ashes and paste like cardboard boxes left out in the rain. And, in a way, I’m jealous of the two years he had, because of what he had. What he found.

What he brought back with him.

When the door swung open, letting the dull hammer of the afternoon sun mash against the pine floor painted to look like expensive wood, it was just a shadow standing there, shambling towards the bar as if about to fall over. Bernie nudged me, and slipped around the bar to get close to this thing which had slipped in, to try and push it back out again before anyone was harassed for spare change. But by then it had already made its way over to me, and it took me a moment to recognize him.

Jesus, Elliott, I said. It was the only thing I could think of saying.

Gone were the sharp angles of his face, the MTV hair, the always day-old stubble he spent every morning cultivating. This was something else. Another creature altogether. His hair fell on his shoulders like curdled milk, knots and nests and tangles. The cable-knit sweater he’d found somewhere, full of holes, smelled so strongly of mold I had to lean back. Everything about him seemed husked out, drained and loose. His eyes darted from the door to the bar, to me, to Bernie, and then to his own feet, shoes molded to them as if rot had melted them there.

Umm… coffee, he said, and he fumbled in his pocket, jingled out a few pennies, and fumbled in his pocket again, drawing out a nickel or two, laying them out with fingers stained with dirt through the cracked skin. He kept going back to his pocket, hoping the change would appear, until he stopped and rested his hand on the bar, looking down at less than a dollar.

Elliott… hey, it’s… it’s okay. It’s on the house.

He shook his head a little, biting his lower lip, chewing on the ratted mess of beard that greased his face.

A strong wind picked up outside and the door banged once. Elliott turned quickly and I could see his whole body tense, near quivering. Bernie was already on the phone so I needed to find a way to keep Elliott here until someone could come by. But I didn’t want to touch him, I didn’t want to try to keep him calm. There was something in the way he watched the door, his jaw clenched, that was so taut. Beneath the smell of mold and sweat there was something else, high and strange, like propane or high voltage wires, the sort of smell that gets your back up, a warning scent.

Elliott, come on… it’s okay. It was just the wind… Elliott. I said his name over and over again, like he was a wounded dog about to bite in its own fear and pain.

Finally he put his hands against the bar again, and sank into the stool, looking to his left, to the empty chair.

Elliott. He looked up at me and his eyes seemed to whine, his hand open, palm up beside him. I… thank God you’re alive.

And that was when he started to cry. Little dribbles of tears slipped out of his eyes, staining his cheeks with dust as they dripped onto his sweater.

Goddamnit. Goddamn him for crying. It was just so completely… not him. I mean, I wouldn’t have… nothing would have happened if he hadn’t started crying like he did.

Before Amber, he was someone you looked up to. He had it together, always: on his way to Uni in Antigonish, a scholarship and everything. He was great for laughs, and I knew when I was around him that he was going places, places I wasn’t really cut out to get to. I always knew that, but it never bothered me. I mean, he never stuck it in your face or anything. It was just something about him. Something he just… was. And here he was crying in public. But more than that: he looked completely lost. Gone.

I wouldn’t have let him come home with me that night, I wouldn’t have let him stay until he sorted everything out. I wasn’t about to feel sorry for him. Clothes or not, shambling or not, I still would have just sent him on to the cops if he hadn’t cried. I would have given him his coffee and waited. Because that’s usually how things are done. I mean… that’s just how it works around here. But the tears…

If you’re still alive, Elliott, if you’re out here with me, or anywhere, fuck you. Because this is where it started. You crying, and me feeling fucking sorry for you.

I’ve spent most of the last few days thinking about Donald. Donald and Shell-Shock. And Elliott, too. It’s funny how they happened to slip into the car beside me, keeping me company over the last little while. The roads out here are empty: no other cars, no houses. I am a little afraid of what strange hitchhikers might be out on these roads, these back roads, single lanes cracked and forgotten.

Yesterday it rained; the day before it didn’t. But I have no way of knowing if it will rain tomorrow — the radio stopped working weeks ago. Or days ago. Time has… has slipped, and stretched ahead and behind me in ways I can’t really explain. Maybe this is the line they crossed over, the place they have all been to, Donald and Shell-Shock and Elliott. Oh my.

The kids used to call him Farting Donald, or the Beholder. They probably still do, but different kids, different names. He sits in the small park on Back Street, more a nook of grass with a bench than a park, really, right beside the old bronzed town bell. He’ll sleep half the morning, stare at traffic the other half, drooling a little. Come the afternoon he used to go to the library across the street and behold.

He’d take a newspaper and sit at one of the long tables underneath the skylight, beside one of the plastic rubber trees strewn around the large center space of the library. Every now and then he would call out — not necessarily yelling, but his voice was so deep and full of import in the middle of that silence that it carried through the whole floor.

Behold, behold the buffalo, he would say, or, Behold, behold the publation.

Sometimes it would make sense — when whatever was in the paper was what he was beholding. Often, though, it had nothing to do with anything. I used to go to the library (believe it or not) and after a few years he started to behold things that made less and less sense. One day it wasn’t even beholding any more, just a spew of vowels peppered with consonants, all in that deep and wise voice of his.

A few days later (this was when I was thirteen or so) I saw one of the library janitors carrying Donald’s favorite chair out to the back dumpster, with a large brown stain sprayed across the seat. He wasn’t welcome there any more, or anywhere else for that matter. Just his bench and God knows where he went when he slept.

Even during the closest, most humid days of summer, Shell Shock wanders the old train tracks that make their meaningless way through town, past the ruins of the steel mill, the shut and locked gates of the pulp mill, all the falling down and forgotten factories of the county. He always has a long stick cocked over his shoulder, cupped close to his waist on the one side with his fist. No one knows where he got the helmet he wears, but we always used to think maybe it was always his, from the war.

To get him going was really easy — just one or two rocks thrown at him, not to hit, close was all it would take. Like a windup toy soldier, he would drop to one knee and start yelling POW! POW POW POW!, aiming his stick into the weeds and bushes that had started to creep out over the old track line, imaginary bullets screaming into the bushes. It was a lot of fun when I was a kid.

They’re both over sixty now. The county has always treated them like faerie folk, leaving free coffee, or bits of food or their empties outside their doors for them to come and collect, as if they could return the favor with a blessing, or spare their curse. The county looks after its own, they say. But they had crossed a line, they had gone out into forbidden country, and they weren’t welcome back with that stamp on their passports.

You can always tell: it’s in people’s voices, that loud high tone of voice that is the sound of their minds backpedaling from whoever it is they’re talking to. "You were there, that tone of voice says. You went to that place we dread, and you can’t come back."

It was in my voice when I asked Elliott to come back to my house. It was in my voice all the way home, with him trembling and sobbing in my car. It was in Barn’s voice, in Elliott’s mother’s voice when she came to see him sitting at my kitchen table, still reeking, still dirty and unclean, a leper, a mind-leper, the worst kind. Why did I tell her he could stay with me a little while? The county, we look after our own.

And why did his mother, who grabbed me at the supermarket, who probed me with her eyes every time I saw her, whose every word, every stare screamed Guilty guilty guilty…, why did she sigh the way she did when I said it?

Because of that leprosy. Because no matter if you’ve been to university or not, or if you’re an accountant like she is, have a nice clean house, a great car and all the signs of having your shit together or not, we all fear that leprosy. Somewhere deep, deep down we’re afraid they’ll take us by the hand one day, our faerie folk, and they’ll take us to that place we don’t want to see. The dark place that’s marked them so. Insanity isn’t contagious, but we put masks on our voices all the same.

I didn’t know what it was that Elliott had found out there, but he sipped coffee in my kitchen the next morning like a wary dog. Amanda had left early and fast first thing, wrinkling her nose at the smell from the sofa, but she’d put on a pot all the same. It was just him and me again for a little while, with the smell of another hazy summer morning starting to push against the curtains. Elliott had showered, but couldn’t get rid of the smell that seemed to follow him, that earth smell, that cobweb smell.

I couldn’t look him in the eyes. Part of that might have been pity, the other part was everything else (and was I to blame? Maybe a little, maybe a lot, maybe not at all). Still, for a few hours we got a chance to spend some time together, just Elliott and me, and it was almost like being thirteen again, if I could look at thirteen through some warped and sick funhouse mirror.

They had us all rounded up together at the beginning of the school year, all of us trying to hide our newly discovered smells and hairs and all the rest, all of us in our flashy new gym shirts, our sweats. Junior High fitness evaluation. Run the track three times. And we didn’t even know each other, pulled from our little gradeschools scattered about Foulton to feed the maw of Foulton Junior/Senior High. I hated phys-ed because I was shit at it. Everyone who is shit at phys-ed hates it. Except Elliott.

I was chunkier at the time and still the fat kid sidekick type, the one whose face is always red and huffing and puffing and saying shit like Jeepers. I even wore glasses, poor fat four-eyed bastard. It’d be a few more years until the pudge was gone.

Elliott was this lanky blond guy with such a calm face. Mr Barry blew his whistle and we all lined up around the half-kilo gravel track. I was beside Elliott. That’s how I met him, running that stupid half-kilo track. I was on the verge of an asthma attack before we even got started, wheezing and huffing and praying to God I didn’t have to pull out my respirator, praying that if I had to no one would say anything. My lungs squeezed and squeezed and squeezed.

Elliott kept pace with me. He looked… bored. The whole way. That was how he was all the way through school. He could do it. He could do anything. But he just… he didn’t give a damn whether he did or he didn’t. I remember coming around the line of the track and hearing Mr Barry screaming Hustle! Hustle! Hustle!, there being guys miles and miles ahead of us, and Elliott flicking the finger, that fuck you gesture behind his back as he sauntered past.

The hell you do that for? I wheezed, ever the little whiner.

’Cause he’s a dick. He’s just a flat-out dick, Elliott said, not even mildly out of breath. He could’ve been walking.

C’mon, boys, hustle! Move move move! the coach yelled, like we were out on a training ground with guns or something, like it was the most important thing in the whole goddamned world. And I had to smile.

Yeah. A dick. Yeah, I said, wheezing my way through.

I stopped. I walked. He stopped. We took the whole period to go 1.5 kilometers. It must have been a new record. I didn’t even dare think of Elliott as a friend. I was the fat sweaty kid who still had his grade-school lunchbox for Christ’s sake. But we hung out. And he…well, he saved me from slipping under the cracks, like so many fat kids, pimply kids, lisping kids — the castaways, the wallflowers, the ones left to drown with the ship.

Elliott sipped his coffee, watching the curtain twitch as a breeze picked up. His eyes flicked with the red checkers of the cloth and nibbled at the tangle of his beard. We hadn’t said a word to each other since I’d brought him home the day before. A door banged as the wind got stronger. He whimpered, and I could see a wet spot spreading on the seat.

What did he ever want to be? He was going to Uni, once upon I time, I swear. I was going to go to college, here in town. Fucked if I know what I was going to do there. The mines were closed, the mills were closed, the auto parts stores were closing. Everyone was getting the fuck out of Dodge. Elliott was too, but Elliott was always going to be going. He looked through school. It was just something in his way.

After a while, I guess things just slide out away from you, the things you always wanted, the things you thought you wanted, and a lot of the time the things you thought you could just put up with. They all sort of slid out away from me, and my real life just sort of… filled in the gaps. I know for sure that I never wrote bartender in my What I Want to Be When I Grow Up essays in grade school. I didn’t tell my guidance counselor that I wanted to work for shit tips and going home drunk. I didn’t want drinking to be my life. I don’t think anyone does. But that was that.

For me, it wasn’t such a big deal — it’s not like I was falling from some sort of grace. I’d been born with the county quicksand in my shoes. My father had worked at the Steel Mill until they laid him off, first for a little while and then for good when I was sixteen and he was fifty. He’d never set foot outside the county. Elliott had a lot farther to fall, and it was like he enjoyed the plunge. Him pissing himself in my chair, this was the bottom for him, maybe. Or maybe he could always go lower, get lower down.

He looked down at the mess he’d made. Ohhh shit, he whimpered. Oh shit, Brian. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

It’s… hey, Elliott, it’s okay.

Is she here? He looked around, grabbed a towel even as I was trying to pretend I couldn’t see the wet spot on his jeans, or the stain that looked like it wasn’t the first time this accident had happened.

Who? Amanda went to work buddy, it’s…—"

Is she here? Did she see? He peered around the side of the curtain, out the big front windows of the apartment kitchen that faced out to the street. Did she see?

Elliott… hey… shhh, man. It’s… it’s okay. Not that it was but, Amanda isn’t home.

She can’t know. She can’t know, Brian.

I won’t tell her.

Don’t. He looked down at the street, the tar curbs starting to shimmer already. Kids would be out soon to peel them into little pebbles. Don’t say a word. Promise. When she comes, promise you won’t let it slip. She can’t see I’m scared. Ever.

It was the first time he looked me in the eyes, and it was like they were lit by the moon on a shallow lake.

Amanda?

He blinked. I don’t think he even knew who I was talking about.

Amanda… she’d… she’d understand.

I didn’t think so. He looked at me like I was losing my mind.

Brian, when Amber comes, you can’t. You can’t let on. He looked down and a tear dropped down his cheek. And was quiet as another tear gathered at his chin to spatter on the floor. Jesus. Oh Jesus. Do you have a pair of pants? Just… just until these dry?

Document B? Sure. What the hell. Document B:

This is a picture of this very same kitchen table. I shit you not, the very same. It is, in fact, the very same kitchen. The same light that is coming through this photo touches me and Elliott, standing there with piss all over his jeans in the not-so-recent past. This photo, though, is a few years older. Elliott is clean. He hasn’t started drinking too, too heavily yet. He still works at Tip Top, the fashionable store for men, while he saves up for Uni. He still wears an earring in his left ear.

Amber is sitting across from him. Her hair is raven black in this picture, so it’s after the henna photo of Document A. She is wearing her clunky-around-the-house glasses that magnify her deep brown eyes. You can’t see the color of her eyes, though, because they are closed. They are closed because Amber and Elliott are leaning across the table kissing, kissing for the stupid camera. The glasses are digging into her cheeks.

She has a bandage around her forearm that is wrapped around Elliott’s neck. The bandage hides a tattoo she got just a few days before, her first real tattoo. This little piece of information makes the photograph six years old, give or take. The scabs on her arm would peel off to leave her permanently marked; the tattoo would emerge from its cocoon to be a wrap of barb wire with hearts along the top edges. She is smiling while she kisses him. He is smiling as he is being kissed by her. They are a happy couple. This completes Document B.

I stepped out to the store for a minute, for some smokes and a chance to try and put those wet jeans further in the past, and when I came back he was gone. The door was still open. All it took was that one minute and he’d vanished. I called the police first this time: damned if I was going to let his mother grab me again in some public place, screaming J’accuse for all it was worth. I was about to call his friends, and my friends, and had to stop. Who knew him now? Who really wanted to stop him wherever he was going? All his ties had shriveled up and died when he walked out the door. We might look after our own, but was he even ours any more? He wasn’t going to Bernie’s to hang out. He wasn’t going to jam with Alex, or get stoned with Eddie Callan.

Why had he even come back? I drove up and down through Foulton looking for him. It doesn’t take long — a strip of two downtown streets, the bridge over the river, the road up to the mall and out onto the highway. He wasn’t going to the Arcade, or to shop at Tip Top. Half the places we used to hang out were closed, the rest were closing. In their place were Tim Hortons and more Tim Hortons, and more Timmys. Pretty soon the whole core would be donut shops and the Music Shop. The only place that did even marginally good business was the bar I worked at, and that’s only because Tim’s doesn’t have cold beers and loud music and the chance to smash a buddy in the mouth with your steel-toed boot.

There are five traffic lights in town. I circled through each of them, up streets and down, looking for him through the alleys, heading up out to the highway and back. Foulton — on the way through to Halifax. That’s pretty much all you can say about it.

I went out one last time before I had to go to work, just before sunset, to look for him. And there he was across the bridge, at the park by the river, picking flowers.

We used to hang out there, where everyone who gets married in this town gets their wedding photos taken. There was even a small party there at the time. The bride kept wrinkling her nose and trying to scowl at him when his back was turned, pretending not to notice him and smile her happy day smile whenever he was looking up. They all glared at me as I crossed the grass: I was probably ruining their light, or their mood.

What could I tell them? We used to hang out here every weekend. The gazebo right in the middle of the park was the perfect place for a gang of twenty kids strung out on Pepsi (and later beer, and later stronger than beer). Like a ghost Elliott had come back to haunt the places he remembered. The pudgy little bride put her arm around her tall useless husband and tried to smile us away. Elliott was ripping the flowers out of the ground, roots and all, biting against that little bit of beard under his lip.

Hey, Brian, he said, not quite looking at me as he grabbed another dandelion out of the grass near the old maple tree at which we used to aim our empties.

Fuck, man, you scared me, I said, trying to keep my voice low since the newlyweds were already shitting on us with their eyes.

Did I? he said, frowning. I’m sorry. He grabbed another dandelion.

I thought… fuck, man… don’t run off like that. I had the cops looking for you and everything.

Oh. Shit, he said. Sorry.

Sorry? He grabbed for another weed, or another flower — I’m not a botanist or anything. He was just grabbing anything with a colorful top to it. Sorry —

It’s… He looked up at me then, those faraway eyes, but he took a breath, and it was that I’m gonna level with you tone he had. Amber and I had a fight.

When?

This morning. After you went to the store. It was… it’s nothing really. Honest. But…. He tried to reach for another flower but I stepped over it. Brian, please, he said. Come on now.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I mean, who would? What do you do when you realize your old best friend is batshit crazy? I wanted to shake him, damn the stupid wedding. They could add it to their book of memories.

Elliott. He kept trying to reach for another flower. I grabbed his wrist. Honestly, I was seconds away from shaking him. Elliott. Amber’s dead.

Did he know? Had he forgotten? He smirked (smirked!).

So you say, he said.

I don’t know if it was pathetic or annoying. I was a little scared all the same, even as I dragged him to his feet.

She’s dead, Elliott. She’s dead. She fucking died. Did I want to crack that bubble around his head? Absolutely. It hurt even to say it. But I pushed him all the same. "She fucking died, Elliott."

You keep saying that, he said. Everyone keeps saying that.

Because it’s a fucking fact! Therapy through pushing, through shoving. He stumbled back, rolled his shoulders and planted his feet.

And then what? he said. It was the strangest thing. He brushed one of the natty clots of hair from his face. And then what?

I didn’t know what else to say. He stared me down. That piss-pants batshit former friend of mine stared me down, and I looked away.

She’ll be here soon, and you’ve… you’ve fucking ruined my bouquet. He shook out the dirt from the broken flowers in his hand, letting the most bruised and bent dandelions fall. Just when I thought I could make it up to her, too.

The sun was going down, and his shadow was getting longer and longer. The last few cicadas of the day were letting out their last chirrrs and the crickets were taking over. He grabbed another dandelion, some little blue flowers, and shuffled them in his hand, back and forth, arranging them, humming to himself under his breath. But he was fidgeting. His hands were starting to tremble, shaking the dirt on top of his rotting shoe.

Look. Look, Elliott… And he looked up. Past me. Past my shoulder. And his face broke into this goddamn awful smile. I hadn’t noticed how many teeth were missing before, how many were brown and yellow.

Hey, you! he said, then he looked down at his shoes. I’m… thanks for coming. I know you didn’t have to. What came out of his mouth next was almost a bark, a sharp cruel sound that was only second cousin to a laugh. Oh, these are for you.

He passed the bouquet around my shoulder and said, Look out, Brian, will you? before turning his eyes past my shoulder again. They’re… well they’re dandelions mostly. Some pansies I think too. But… it’s the thought that counts, right?

There was a silence. I know. I’m so sorry, baby. I’m sorry. He bit his lip and lowered his head. I’m sorry, alright? The flowers were still in his hand when he brought his arm back. I still have that at least. Still in his left hand.

I’ll make it up to you. I promise. He smiled. Ready to go?

It was the strangest thing. A breeze picked up between us. It had to be from… the north? I thought so at the time. It was a breeze so cold that goosebumps rose on my arms. So cold that as I stared at Elliott, into those dead eyes, I could see my own breath for a second. Those long dead eyes. It’s from that place in his eyes that he spoke, the dead places he’d been.

I’ve got to go now, Brian, he said, and backed away. The cold went with him.

The long, long shadow of him along the ground showed an outstretched hand dropping those flowers, and then cupping backward, as if to grab someone’s hand. I couldn’t even look at him, only the way his shadow spread all the way to the old dead tree where empties still gathered. The bride and her groom, her wedding photographer and happy times, were all gone. There was no one to hear him but me.

We’re very busy tonight, Brian, but I’ll pop by later, okay? He started to walk away. I could hear him going. And then, Brian? I looked up into that broken face. Great we’re all back together again, isn’t it? He smirked once more. Don’t wait up for us though.

He turned and walked away quickly, his hand raised high through the lights of the streetlamps (how did it get dark so soon?), through the circle of oak trees in the corner of the park. A dust-devil kicked up rotting leaves beside him and settled down again. The only sound was trash settling back. The night folded over him, and he was gone.

Here is a memory that has no photographs:

There is a tall fir tree outside a window. The branches brushing against the window are dropping snow onto the ground as they blow in a light breeze. There was a blizzard the night before. No one could leave Eddie Callan’s party so we were all sleeping in his living room, sprawled all over the floor. His parents were away so we had all just crashed out wherever. I could hear the sounds of six people snoring all around me, and the brush of the fir tree at the window. The window pane was coated in ice from all the breath rising from the living room floor. Like stained glass it warped the purple and slight red of a midwinter sunrise.

It was Amber’s clutch that had woken me up. I had met her the night before. She was a friend of a friend of Eddie’s, who’d come into town with him on the rumour of Callan’s freedom party. We had talked most of the night, this out of town girl and I, even as everyone crashed out around us, whispering our lives to each other in the dark. I didn’t try to make a move on her. I’d already had the pleasure of being laughed at by any number of girls that miserable year of Grade 10. Still hadn’t lost the weight, the pimples, the fat kid sidekick. But I had wanted to. No one knows how much I had wanted to.

She was breathing into my shoulder, the long slow breaths of deep, deep sleep. As the light in the room got brighter, I could see the curl of her breath rising off my shoulder,