Spark

By J . A Brooks

Remember the time you realized your parents were not the indestructible heroes you believed them to be, but they were actually flawed human beings who made mistakes like everyone else? And from that moment on you saw them, and the world, through a different lens? Equally world-changing was the moment your parents no longer saw you as a child, but rather as the person they no longer needed to rule.

How quickly our view of the world can shift.
Regardless of how divided we all may feel, what binds us is knowledge: of our favorites to our fears, and that moment, that single moment, when we understand what it means to be alive.

Set in the fictional coastal town of Hurstbridge, SPARK follows the journey of Jonah, a bookish loner with an attraction to electronics. The son of two intercultural women and unmistakable bully bait, Jonah desperately seeks the friendship of Mack, his disillusioned alpha-bigot neighbor.

A retired electrician, Mack is new to the community, where he believes he's found the perfect place to spend his final days. Relentlessly pursued by Jonah, Mack decides to take the boy under his wing, to help him become the only kind of person he thinks should exist in the world, a man not unlike himself. Jonah, grateful for the father figure, is willing to do what it takes to make Mack a friend, even going beyond what he believes to be right when Mack asks him to keep the ultimate secret: the day Mack has chosen to die. Each has their own agenda, each expecting a certain outcome.

Told through the eyes of twelve-going-on-thirteen-year-old Jonah, SPARK is a tale of innocence lost, knowledge gained and lessons learned as he navigates friendships, keeps secrets and realizes what it means to grow up.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Sep 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9780228860402

J . A Brooks

J . A BROOKS is the son of a newspaper editor and award-winning playwright, and blood-lined to renowned author Edwy Brooks. He is an inspired, prolific creative working independently for over twenty years.Passionate about stories that incite emotional responses of self-reflection, compassion and decency, SPARK marks J . A Brooks' debut into the novel world.

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Copyright © 2021 by J.A Brooks

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-6039-6 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-6038-9 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-6040-2 (eBook)

Contents

STAGE 1: GETTING TO KNOW YOU

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

STAGE 2: A SECRET THAT KEEPS IS A TRUTH THAT WEEPS

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

STAGE 3: A MAN’S GOTTA DO WHAT A MAN’S GOTTA DO

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

STAGE 4: GOODBYE, INNOCENCE

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

FORTY-THREE

FORTY-FOUR

FORTY-FIVE

FORTY-SIX

FORTY-SEVEN

STAGE 5: THE ENDS OF THE CIRCLE MEET

FORTY-EIGHT

FORTY-NINE

FIFTY

FIFTY-ONE

FIFTY-TWO

FIFTY-THREE

FIFTY-FOUR

FIFTY-FIVE

FIFTY-SIX

FIFTY-SEVEN

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable,

like force and matter.

When they separate, man is no more.

Nikola Tesla

For decisions of those that shape us.

Thank you.

STAGE 1

GETTING TO KNOW YOU

ONE

I am the world’s best failed abortion. Apparently.

I could ask everyone I know what that means, so, let’s say twenty people, and I’d get the same amount of different answers.

I don’t even know what it means, and it’s me who I’m talking about. I know I’m different, but I couldn’t compare it to anything yet. It’s understanding the word failed to mean something positive which is the hardest to comprehend for me. And it’s also about me being alive, right? Because if I was a successful abortion, I’d be dead. And isn’t being alive the idea?

This funeral is spinning me out. The cemetery is too hilly, too steep, and I wonder if all the caskets in the ground slide downhill when it rains, making an underground junk pile of bodies. Every mourner is surrounding the grave like an intervention (I saw interventions on TV on this show I can’t remember the name of, but it’s like that). Each person steps forward, one at a time, picking up a handful of dirt and dropping it on the casket. The smaller the hand, the smaller the clump of earth that doofs the wood. There’s a body in the casket, but there are spots inside that aren’t solid, not solid like a tree trunk. But when the dirt hits, there’s no echo. Every funeral I’ve been to, I’ve never heard an echo.

Perhaps it’s the polish on the wood. Why a casket needs to shine so much is difficult to say. Does the body inside care at all? Why would they? They’re dead.

If they actually knew what was going on, they’d sit up and say, What’s all the fuss with the shiny box? It’s not like I’m dead or anything.

What is death like, I wonder. I went to my first funeral at four years old, Grandpa Gary. I have one memory of him still, and that’s trying to pry the TV remote from his hand. He was dead about two days before we found him, sitting on his armchair with the TV blaring. My moms were crying and trying to console Grandma Annette as well as calling someone, and I was left to wander.

Why was the TV so loud if he was so close to it? I stepped up to his armchair and saw the remote half-sticking out of his hand. I tried to pull it out, but his grip was stuck and I didn’t have the strength. I also didn’t know at the time that the power button was right at the top. I could’ve just pushed that.

So, he just died watching something on TV, natural causes. The show he was watching wasn’t called Natural Causes, I mean that was the diagnosis of why he died. Wouldn’t that be a coincidence, if he was watching a show called Natural Causes? If that sort of coincidence is possible for everyone who dies in front of the TV, I hope he was watching a show called Your Family Loves You. Grandma Annette was away with my moms and me, so none of us got to say goodbye. That’s an odd thing to consider; saying goodbye forever without knowing it was the last goodbye.

And natural causes seemed so unclear and non-specific. What do we naturally die from and how do we stop nature? Doctors can put people back together after limbs go rogue from severe accidents. They can replace entire organs and just sew us up again. They can even remove improper genes before birth, but they cannot stop death? It’s the inevitability that makes me wonder why we try at all.

Like I said, I knew about death since when I was four. We live with the knowledge that one day we are going to die, all of us, but we know nothing about what it’s like. I’ve asked everybody I know what it’s like to die, and no one has a solid answer. This is probably it, is the closest we’ll get knowing, says Grandma Annette, and Then you just go. Not helping.

I look around and see all the faces and wonder if they’re thinking the same thing, questioning death even more. I mean every funeral I’ve been to, there’s a mourner who wails in wonder.

WHY!?

Right on cue. A solid middle-aged woman in bleak all-blacks, grasping a purest of pure white handkerchief, sobs after nearly exploding with her question.

I wonder if she knows the answer and she’s just questioning why we have to die, or perhaps she was given a reason by a doctor as vague as natural causes and needs some real answers.

If she’s questioning death more, like I am, do we all do that?

The Lily, possibly the whitest I’ve ever seen and largest I’ve ever seen, is now almost completely covered with dirt on the casket.

My moms, being florists (and so I trust they should know about flowers), say that the Lily is the funeral flower because of the purity it represents, that as a human, regardless of how bad you are, you are returning to the one place where you are absolutely pure. Which I guess is nothing? So being a failed abortion could be the beginning of me losing my purity, getting closer to death—which is gonna happen—and a journey to nothingness, even though I escaped death by living. See what funerals do to us? They make us think so much about death.

What if it wasn’t this way and we could just choose when we go? We just say goodbye, leave, walk into a building or business or simply a bottomless hole in the middle of nowhere, and that’s it, we’re never seen again. Because life will still go on Not ours, of course, but life in general.

I know that’s not how it works, but I’m thinking it could, and here’s why.

TWO

Nothing is scarier than being at the top of something and not being able to see the bottom. Perhaps it’s a way to measure how much it’ll hurt to fall, to know where your drop will stop. There’s something in me that makes me retreat from the edge, from looking down at heights. Being at the gates of the unknown, that’s more than fear and more than survival instinct. It’s the loss of not knowing.

Once I know something, how can it be unknown without severe trauma to the brain? That’s why I don’t swim in the ocean—no thank you. I can’t see underwater, I can’t breathe underwater, most things down there either want to eat me or sting me, my skin gets all soft in water, it smells like dead fish of course, and it’s full of our sewage.

What are the pros? Knowledge?

Call me ignorant, dumb, naïve, it doesn’t matter; I don’t need that knowledge.

Living in a coastal town, it’s difficult to express my dislike for being in the ocean as the usual response is something like a scrunched-up face and a grunt or a scoff. So, I keep it to myself.

It could also be that we live in Hurstbridge, the closest town to the highest cliff edge in the world that you could literally drive over. A coastal town with no beach, not even sand. Just that gift from nature of a cliff. We’re close enough to the nearest big city, where I go to school, but far enough away to know I’m one of the few people with dark skin around. We’re also famous for having hills everywhere; nowhere is completely flat. I haven’t travelled much, pretty well just to school and back, but from what I’ve seen of the world in photos, nothing is ever completely flat. So it seems odd that Hurstbridge claims that as something to be famous for, when it’s not that different from the rest of Earth. Perhaps it’s just an add-on to make it sound like we have more than just the incredible cliff.

People come from all over the world to get a photo of themselves standing near the edge. So many that we even had a sign put up—a Welcome to Hurstbridge sign that was chiselled out of wood. No wait, chiselled into wood? It’s a tree log, on its side, with raised letters that have been cut around and into the log to make them raised. Then the letters were painted to stand out. On, in or out, they’re part of the log anyway.

When you look down the edge, you can’t see where the ocean meets the rocks, like, it’s not there. The cliff face is too steep and the drop too far. Waves from the top seem like crinkles in a shirt that mother nature keeps ironing out. And you can’t hear the waves crashing either because the wind is too strong; the never-stopping wind. Luckily, it’s always coming inland. Otherwise you’d be pushed off and have no choice but to fly to a wet grave.

Some thrill seekers have tried to jump off the edge on their giant cymbals connected to kite wings, but no one hasn’t been blown in against the cliff or down the coast like a game of snakes and ladders that has no ladders and only one snake that goes right to the bottom. Most survived, some disappeared, and others weren’t so lucky.

It is really beautiful to look across the ocean, that’s true, just ridiculously scary to think of going over the edge.

My moms don’t like to drive very much so they don’t take me down the coast. Grandma Annette has though, a couple of times, in her convertible. She said she started living when Grandpa Gary died, like she forgot who she was before that. She got life insurance that she said she can live on for the rest of her days, plus bought the convertible, which we named Gary.

The main road through our city heads out to the west, which follows the coastline for what seems like forever. You can’t see the end of the road as it twists down the coastal edge. If you rest your head on the road, it feels like you’re looking down, the same way you do at the cliff. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never wanted to get out of town.

Between the coast and the town is a long stretch of forest with thick bushland, roads, waterways and blank spots. Standing on the road, looking into the trees, you can’t see too far. So many tourists have gotten lost in there, and they must have been way more experienced at navigation than I am, given they made it here to begin with. So, I don’t go in the bushlands either.

The town is nice though, well, nice enough. Nearly every house near me looks different to the one next to it. So much the same function, just different in appearance. Hurstbridge is very gay-friendly as well. Not completely same-sex-couples-friendly, but gay-friendly, yes. Actually, gay couples bought houses here until they became the majority, and therefore made it gay-friendly. That’s how I got to live here with my moms.

THREE

Practical jokes are the best idea since the invention of ideas.

Mack says they’re the best dickhead-meter around. I think he means that you can decide who you want in your life by the sense of humor of either the joker or the joke.

He also says that a good practical joke to a betting man is worth a cool twenty. I think he means twenty dollars, as what else would he give me twenty of? I need to interpret a fair amount of what he says.

Our home is nothing special to others, but it’s special to us. My moms fixed it up for years while I was growing up. The lawn is cut just so, the diamond-shaped path from the sidewalk to the porch is perfectly symmetrical. The outside of the house is always clean somehow. Some houses in the neighbourhood have paint peeling off, or gutters full of leaves or something hanging off, so I know ours is either indestructible or looked after well. The steps to the porch are the only thing that probably need replacing. They creak and bounce when you step on them, so I jump over them to avoid me being the one who finally brakes them.

The garden, of course, is full of flowers that seem to bloom all year round. Having florists for homeowners, it makes sense for them to show off their talents. Sometimes I want to pull out a bamboo stalk—the ones that some plants are tied to—and slash at the stems of all the flowers. Off with their heads! I don’t know why, but it seems like it would be fun to do. But I don’t, because I love my moms and I’d know what their faces would look like, and then that image would be stuck in my head. Just like the time I was five and was bursting to poo . . .

I was playing outside and made it all the way home, but as soon as I opened the front door, well for some reason I knew I couldn’t make it to the bathroom, so I dropped my pants, squatted in the doorway and let it all out there. The relief was beyond amazing, but that was broken in a million pieces when Robyn and Grace turned into the hall to see the present I’d left for one of them to clean up. Their faces are burned into the back of my eyes.

As it turns out, Robyn was against getting a dog because she couldn’t stand the concept of cleaning up after it. After drawing the short straw to clean up my mess, though, she realised a dog wouldn’t be that big a deal, and that’s how we got Molly.

Molly’s old, well only six human years, but that’s forty-two dog years, which means that she should have moved on from being annoying, but she’s a chocolate Labrador, and apparently, they have energy forever.

She annoys me constantly. One time, I was adjusting the sprinkler system in the front yard for a little practical jokester gold and she kept licking me and standing over what I’m looking at. I’d nudge her neck with my head to push her aside so I could concentrate.

Okay, I’ve adjusted the angle of the sprinkler heads and the rest of this one is all about timing, which means I need to know the subject and the times that they will be where I need them to be to execute the joke.

Robyn will leave the house first, because she always does, to load the van.

Then Grace will come out and forget something, while Robyn waits with her hands on her hips.

Then when they both—

Morning, Jonah, I heard behind me. The voice was so distinctive, like the rev of a motorcycle you hear on your street, and just as gruff.

It was Mack, my neighbor, my friend, my mentor, so I turned my head and—My god, what is he wearing?

It was the fluffiest robe I’d ever seen. It might have once been pink, but now it’s severely faded into a pearly gray and I’d seen it before but couldn’t remember where. No, no. Jonah, focus.

I saw him sipping from a cup. Being that early in the morning, it had to be hot chocolate. That meant he knew nearly as much as I did that soon there was going to be a show worth watching.

Morning, Mack. I replied as I turned back to focus on the sprinkler circuit board.

Great!

Now I’m distracted and I’ve lost a few seconds.

But I can’t blame him, he’s probably going to be proud that I even tried, and he wants to see me succeed, as he doesn’t have any kids of his own.

Not on the cards is what he told me.

What he didn’t tell me was the origin of Mack. Grandma Annette says in her day it was a nickname for Malcolm. Mack said he’s named after the brand of indestructible trucks. I suspect both could be a version of the truth. I asked him soon after we first met, so he wasn’t so open then. And I only asked him because he asked why I was named Jonah. I told him what I knew; that Robyn and Grace were in a really bad car accident on the way to the hospital so Grace could give birth to me, and the man who helped them and delivered me was named Jonah. But Mack says Grace has a bible fetish. I don’t know what that means.

Whatcha doin’ there, Hun? Another familiar voice, so I didn’t need to turn around for this one.

She’s early, and I’m out of time.

Nothing you want me to be doin’.

If I said anything or if I turn and looked at her, she might see what I was doing. Robyn, my Black mom, I knew was no doubt carrying a bunch of posters or banners or stuff for whatever march or protest or rally her and Grace were going to. She walked by me, I looked up and saw she was wearing her rainbow suspenders; and, yep, banners for a protest. She put them in their van in the driveway. No idea why she’d take the van to a protest because it’s got their business name and slogan all down the side—She Loves Me, He Loves Me Not Flowers by R&G. They’d be so easy to track down.

Grace needs a hand, go help please, was her next and expected sentence. The level of directness in her tone meant she wasn’t happy I didn’t reply to her, thinking I’d ignored her, and she was trying to get my attention. I was done now anyway. But that’s when Grace came out the front door. She’s my white mom, which makes sense of how I ended up looking like a blend of them both. Try explaining that to the bullies at school; no, my Black mom does not have a penis, no I wasn’t born twice, no I’m not a lesbian because my moms are lesbians, or any of the other hundreds of obvious explanations I’ve had to make over the years. Grace was injected with a donation from