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Harassment

Lucinda MacDonald hasn’t made direct contact with her abusive father Carl MacDonald for 20 years, but after a celebration of life for her brother Larry, whose death she blames on the old man, she starts receiving harassing phone calls from him. She wants to throw away her phone and contact the police, but her husband Josh tells her not to…

The phone calls began just a couple of days after Larry’s celebration of life. Every day, at least once a day, my phone would summon and—if I answered—I’d hear his raspy voice burrowing into my ear, clawing deeper and deeper into the thinking flesh.

That first time I tailspinned into utter shock and terror. How did he get my number? I wanted to throw my phone down onto the pavement and stomp it, as if it was a cockroach or a rat that had somehow wheedled its way into my purse, where it would spawn and infest and infect me if I didn’t kill it.

“Don’t do that,” Josh admonished, gripping me by the shoulders and fixing me with his gangster-eyes.

“Why not?” I shouted. “I’ll get another phone!”

“Yes, let’s get you another phone, but keep that one and—I hate to say this, love—but you’ve gotta take his calls, not always but from time-to-time.”

“Why the fuck would I want to do that?”

He sighed. “Because that phone is his only means of contact right now. If you cut the connection or refuse to answer, he’ll start looking for another way. He’s bat-shit crazy. He wants to get back at you…”

“Get back at me?” I howled.

“Don’t try to think it through, love,” he forced me to look at him, bracketing my head in his hands. “Bat-shit crazy. Just remember that.”

“I’ll go to the cops. Det. Drennan. Get a restraining order.”

Josh shook his head, like a teacher frustrated by a student playing stupid.

“Why not? He should know about this, shouldn’t he. It will help with his investigation.”

“Your old-man isn’t going to obey any restraining order, hon. How many times have you read in the news about a woman being assaulted and killed by a husband who was under a restraining order. For christ’s sake, it will only make him madder.”

He was right, of course. I slumped, all the fight gone out of me. He held me in his arms and rocked us consolingly. My fear subsided. Josh soaked it up like a sponge, calming me through some kind of emotional osmosis, comforting me like a child.

“What are we going to do?”

“It’s going to be hard, love. Really hard,” he warned.

“I know.”

“We’re going to keep him on the line, like a fish on a hook, and reel him in.” He ogled and squirmed like a cod flopping around in the bottom of a boat before you whacked it on the head.

“Stop talking in metaphor,” I shoved him away.

We laughed.

“Seriously, you’re going to have to play him, hon, until we figure out what to do. In the meantime, keep a record of every call and download his messages. Just because we’re keeping this secret doesn’t mean we’ve got anything to hide. Consider every exchange with your old-man as evidence. We may need it for our day in court, if it ever comes to that.”

“Where did you learn all this stuff?”

Josh looked nobly over my shoulder, an aristocrat posing for posterity. “My depths are in a different lake from yours, sweetheart, but they’re just as deep and just as dark.”

“Fuck off,” I shoved him again, and he received my benediction gleefully. If I didn’t love that man so much, I’d have to hate him.

***

Date/Time: 20100802-1143

Location: Oswego Street, Penthouse

CM: [Breathing heavily, not talking.]

LM: [Listening, waiting.]

CM: [In a taunting tone of voice] Why don’t you say something, sweetheart?

LM: I’ve got nothing to say to you. Stop calling me.

CM: Nothing to say? After all these years?

LM: Nothing to say. Ever. Stop calling me.

CM: But I’ve forgiven you. You don’t have to feel ashamed.

LM: [Listening, waiting.]

CM: My wounds healed up a long time ago—except the cuts to my heart, lovie. There’s not even any scars. You’re forgiven.

LM: [Listening, waiting.]

CM: Don’t you think it’s time we became a family again?

LM: We never were a family. You were—still are—a tyrant and a perv. Stop calling me.

CM: [In a sneering tone] That’s not a very nice thing to say! You were delusional that night, honey. I never meant to hurt you. I just wanted to console you, is all. 

LM: ‘Fucking bitch! I’ll kill you!’ You don’t remember yelling that?

CM: Yeah! After you hit me with a shot of bear spray!

LM: ‘You’re all alike, you bitches!’ Don’t you remember saying that about me and Mom, down in the kitchen, before you came up to lovingly attack me?

CM: [Getting angry] I was grieving, for christ’s sake! Out of my mind with grief!

LM: And breaking down my bedroom door was part of your grieving process?

CM: I’m not that man anymore, Lucinda. I’ve got over my grief.

LM: I’m happy for you. Now, stop calling me.

CM: How come you keep saying that? Don’t you want to be a family again?

LM: You’re not part of my family, Father. Never will be. Stop calling me.

CM: I regret having said it out loud, dear, but you really are a bitch! Aren’t you?

LM: Stop calling me, and you won’t have to put up with my bitchiness anymore. 

CM: I’ll never stop calling you, hon. I’ll never stop trying to pull our family back together.

LM: [Listening, waiting.]

CM: I’m a grandfather now. I want to see my grandson. Get to know him.

LM: [Listening, waiting.]

CM: D’ya hear me! I want to get to know my grandson. Be a grandfather to him.

LM: The same way you were a father to Larry?

CM: I was a good father. Larry needed toughening up. Needed to become a man.

LM: [Angrily] Was spray painting his mural and kicking him half to death inside his tent part of your making ‘a man’ him?

CM: You’re nuts! I never had anything to do with that!

LM: [Listening, waiting.]

CM: You can’t keep me from seeing my grandson! I’ve got rights as his grandfather!

LM: Try to see him and I’ll get a restraining order slapped on your ass before sunset. I’ve still got all the evidence I’d need to make an order stick, and I won’t hesitate to make our sordid details public. There’s no need to keep them secret anymore. If you want to share that bit of family lore with my sisters, go ahead and try me.

CM: [Silence]

LM: [Ends call]

Funeral Box

Larry’s sisters Lucinda, Loretta and Louise MacDonald, joined by Lucinda’s new best friend Brenda Tanner, have convened over dinner at an outdoor café in Victoria’s Bastion Square. They’re planning Larry’s Celebration of Life. He had sustained serious injuries after being attacked in the parking lot where he was camped out while working on a mural commissioned ‘retrospectively’ by Brenda. His assailant had defaced the mural, which Larry had just completed and dedicated to Lucinda’s son Manny. But that assault wasn’t the cause of death; Larry died of an overdose in a nearby back alley. A homeless person and recognized graffiti artist, Larry had been living on the streets for about five years, after fleeing the haunted house of his and the MacDonald sisters’ abusive father Carl MacDonald…

***

We wouldn’t go for fancy, would leave Larry’s ashes in the provided black plastic, standard issue funeral box. “It’s what he would have wanted,” I argued. “I don’t want to make his death anything other than what it is by putting his remains into a fancy urn or scattering them to the four winds from some mountaintop you can only get to in a frigging helicopter. He’s dead. The cremated contents in that heavy black container we received are all that’s left of him. The only place Larry lives is in our hearts and minds.”

For a minute we sat in silence, immersed in our private thoughts, oblivious to the soundscape of our outdoor café and Wharf Street.

Brenda and my sisters agreed… eventually.

Cheapskates, Echo chided.

I had taken Larry’s cremation tag to a jeweller who fashioned it into a necklace. My sisters bridled when I showed it to them. “That’s morbid!” Louise made a face. I teased her for looking like an emoji. “Who’s going to wear it?” Loretta wanted to know.

Weird, Echo jumped into the fray.

“It’s symbolic,” I explained. “I want people to ask your question, Loretta; and I want them to cringe like you just did, Louise. Consider it a piece of functional art, a sort of fashion statement…”

I quavered, near tears. They backed off, giving me time and space.  

“Who’s going to wear the medallion?” Brenda quietly insisted after a while.

“Good question,” I conceded. “I want everyone to wear it, I suppose.”

Stupid answer, Echo challenged.

I described what I envisioned as Larry’s memorial: a small, round table draped in black; the funeral box on it, elevated by a little pedestal; a commissioned portrait of Larry placed to one side; the cremation-tag necklace on the other; the whole display positioned in front of Larry’s mural—we had already determined that Larry’s life would be celebrated there, and that his temporary shrine would be placed next to his dedication of the wall to Manny.

Brenda had commissioned an artist to restore the mural. She told him to begin with the inscription, and ‘continue with your healing strokes from there.’ She also instructed him to time-lapse the restoration with a camera located on the opposite side of the lot. “We’ll record a piece of art in the remaking to share with the world,” she said. “Love defies entropy,” she proclaimed mysteriously. 

Larry would have appreciated the ironic subtext of us using his remains to remind mourning celebrants that, As long as there are eyes to see and minds to remember, this work of art will be envisioned—it will not fade. For him, the fact that eyes develop cataracts and eventually go blind, and memories are ephemeral as plucked harp strings, didn’t constrain or limit consciousness. Larry believed in a universal spirit—chords that resonate and are forever resurrected in the network of awakened, believing souls.

God! And I thought I was the certified philosopher in the family!

I didn’t dare attempt to describe the twisted intellectual rhizomes he’d germinated in the rootball of my infested brain, but I did want to weave what I could make of them subliminally into Larry’s celebration of life, which we were planning. The thought of discussing his memorial indoors stifled me, made me feel like a wrapped mummy in a stone crypt. En plein air, I insisted. Whether out of compassion or enthusiasm, I couldn’t say, but they agreed, and we met at Bastion Square.

It was a bright, sunny evening. We shared an unspoken sense of guilt to be enjoying the breeze, the vibrance of passing traffic, the restaurant chatter and clatter, drinks, good food and—yes—even merriment while we were making arrangements to say our last goodbyes to the canister of ashes that had once been our brother and new-found friend. Larry would have forgiven us. But there was another foreboding source of darkness creeping across the pavement as the westering sun declined and shadows lengthened—Father?

What should we do about Father?

Loretta and Louise didn’t know he had tried to rape me; they only knew we’d had a ‘terrible row’ and that I’d left for good—‘and good riddance’ he’d complained. “If she wasn’t my daughter, I’d report her to the police,” he told them. “She attacked me with a fucking knife!”

I never corrected his version of events. How could I tell my sisters they were living under the same roof as a pervert who had tried to rape one of his own daughters? How could I report him, and have social services step in and shuffle my sisters and brother off into foster care? I did what I had to—warned the old bastard to keep his hands off them, and did my best to keep in touch with my siblings. Brenda was the only one at the table who I’d confided to about my father’s attempted rape; she shot me a warning glance when Loretta asked, “What do we do about Father?”

My whole body cramped. I wanted to shout, How can you even ask that? But managed to keep my mouth clamped shut. Hadn’t they made the connection between Father’s drive-by and the night-time assault on our brother? Wasn’t it obvious that his vicious upbringing had permanently damaged Larry—that he’d verbally battered our brother from the moment Larry had offered the first tentative, shy glimpses of his artist’s soul? Couldn’t they see what a FUCKING HYPOCRISY it would be to invite that piece of shit to my brother’s celebration of life?

“Of course they know all that, hon,” Brenda consoled later. “But they’re prepared to give him the benefit of their doubts; you don’t have any doubts. He destroyed any possibility of doubt that night he tried to rape you.”

In the end, before we left the café, we’d agreed that one of my sisters would invite Father, but that they’d also deliver a letter warning him not to approach me, or my son Manny, or to try communicating with us in any way. I’d walked to Bastion Square, but didn’t feel up to the return trip home and asked Brenda if she’d give me a lift. I felt defeated, knew I’d be increasingly fretful and oppressed at the prospect of meeting the real-life-ogre who had tried to rape me—my father. I wanted Brenda’s companionship. She walked me up to the penthouse instead of dropping me off out front on Oswego Street. I imagined her tucking me in and kissing me goodnight on the forehead before she crept out of my boudoir. Silly me! For the one-and-only first time, she stayed the night.

Talk about The Agonies and the Ecstasies of Lucinda MacDonald’s fucked up life!

Dance of Destruction

Homeless street artist Larry MacDonald is camped in the parking lot of the Inner Worlds Gallery in downtown Victoria. He has just completed a mural on the gallery’s external back wall, and has been commissioned to do another by gallery owner Brenda Tanner. The lot is enclosed behind a locked wrought iron gate. That’s not enough to make Larry feel secure though… nothing can make him safe from the threatening spectre of his abusive, tyrannical father, Carl MacDonald…

Imagine yourself a gentle spirit, camped—with permission—in a downtown parking lot. You don’t know what time it is because you don’t own a watch or a mobile to keep track of your days, hours, and minutes. You’re alone, a tiny node that exists in an infinite, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent network of connected conscious being.

Something has awakened you, and you’re instinctively alarmed, alert to every sound emerging out of the darkness. Might have been nothing, you think. But your body remains tensed, your breathing paused, heart thumping. Possibly an imagined sound? The fading clank of metal against metal conjured in a dream, a nightmare.

 It’s gone. But you listen intently, trying to detect its echo merged into the background noise of urbanity: the hum of electricity through a faulty circuit; the distant throb of a motorcycle…

There! No mistaking it this time. It’s a sound you’ve heard before, one that matches a pattern most people would recognize, the sound of a chain rattling as it’s removed from a wrought iron gate and dropped to the ground.

Brenda? That doesn’t make sense. Why would she be here?

Another sound torques your anxiety, the unmistakable rattle of metal wheels on concrete, the gate opening. Not all the way. Just wide enough for a person to sneak through.

Should you unzip your tent door-flap and look to see who it is? Would you be able to identify them in the darkness? Should you shout, Who’s there? Let them know their trespass is not going unobserved.

No! Best to remain perfectly still, to pretend you don’t exist. Be invisible!

The scuffle of boots on gravel moves toward the far end of the Inner World Gallery’s back wall. Then there’s the sound of something being dropped to the ground, a backpack. Its owner rummages around, grunting, annoyed. You know who’s making the rooting, grunting sounds, but refuse to let that knowledge surface. It swims like a shark in its murky, unconscious depths; if you name the source of your terror, you will make it real.

Another sound sends tremors of panic and agony shooting through your nervous system. It’s the sound of a steel ball ricocheting against the inner wall of a shaken spray paint canister. Nooo! Your spirit shrivels like tissue paper thrown into a flame. Nooo! You want to block your ears. But you have to listen. It’s your day of judgment; refusing to give it voice by not listening would be a sin. You will be punished for that act of rebellion. It’s your duty to pay attention to the sputtered hiss of retribution. You will be chastised for denial.

Again and again, the canisters are shaken, the paint sprays. What colours is he spewing to obliterate my art? You ask the question as you infold, arms hugging knees, head tucked, eyes shut. ‘Whimpering like a whipped dog,’ as he would describe it. 

Does it even matter which frequencies of light would be absorbed, which reflected in this vandal’s aerosol, his obliterating mist? It’s all black, and white, and shades of grey out there in his monochrome universe. His is the joyless satisfaction of a nihilist, of one who measures his stature by the piles of rubble and mounds of corpses he leaves behind.

I hate you! You want to shout. But you bottle and cork your rage because you know it’s pathetic. It would only fan the vitriolic fuel of his pleasure. He knows you’re helpless. You cannot stand up to him. Your petulance would only prove how successful he’s being with his torture.

Then the spraying stops. He turns, his boots rasping in the gravel, and faces your fabric shelter. He’s breathing heavily—not because he’s exhausted by his acts of desecration, but because he’s inflamed and needs more oxygen to sustain his obliterating passion. His boot smashes into the side of your tent with the force of a boulder dropped out of the sky. He’s stomping, kicking, trampling, an avenging demon come to destroy you. Not content to feel the collapse of willowy poles and fabric underfoot, this pulverizing Shiva continues his Dance of Destruction until he’s stomping and battering the human shape within its flattened shroud.

Only then do you comprehend the true nature of his furious assault—that he has come to kill you.

Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

‘Stupid’ isn’t the first word that comes to mind when you’ve been launched like a rocket out the driver’s-side door of the Volkswagen beetle you were driving down the 401. Nor does it come to mind as you watch the car tumble down the embankment beneath you, shards of glass and assorted artifacts flying out the open doors and smashed windows. Or when you notice the tires spinning frantically as if they might gain some sort of traction mid-air through its demolition rollover.

It doesn’t occur to you at the apogee of your wingless flight as you arc into your death-defining decsent, wondering which boulder is going to smash your head, or crooked tree limb run you through.

The word that first comes to mind is, “Yaaaaah!”

But you don’t even get a chance to scream out loud. You want to, but time has downshifted into slow-mo, and you can’t get your vocal cords to synchronize with the stretched wavelength of your fatal trajectory. Your death cry is stifled. You’re a giant bean bag that’s been tossed off the back of a truck.

Later, once you’re sure you have survived, you will review millisecond by millisecond the instant replay of your flight. Then you will have time to insert thoughts into your version of events, pause and shuffle the sequence into frames that might be numbered like a book’s: Stupid-Page 1, Stupid-Page 2, and so on.

It’s hard to pinpoint the beginning, middle and end of such an episode. Stupid-Page 1 could have been pegged to the day me and my girlfriend stuck out our thumbs and headed west, on the first leg of our hitch-hiking odyssey from Montreal to the West Coast of Vancouver Island. Or when we piled out of the car after our first ride and stuffed half our worldly belongings into a culvert to ‘lighten the load.’ Or when we decided the load would be even lighter if we went our separate ways because each of us came to think the other stupid in some way-shape-or-form.

Let’s fast-forward to a coordinate somewhere between Toronto and Cornwall Ontario on the last leg of my solo return trip. It’s five or six o’clock in the morning and I’m already on the shoulder of the 401, hitching. A guy in a faded blue VW Bug pulls over and offers me a ride. But before I can get in the opened passenger side door, he says, “Hey, I’ve been driving all night. Can you take over for a while?”

That’s Page-1 in his stupid portfolio; my acceptance of his request Page-101 in mine. I mean, would you ask a complete stranger, who looked like he’d just climbed out of a ditch—because in fact, he had—to drive your car while you took a nap? But pots can’t call kettles black; would you take him up on the offer if you didn’t even have a learner’s permit and the only time you’d actually driven a car you were sitting in your father’s lap?

Don’t answer.

“Never driven a standard?” my sleep-deprived companion asked when I tried to grind the shifter into first. “Push down the clutch… That’s the pedal on the left… now slip the shifter into first.” Being a quick learner doesn’t disqualify you from the ranks of stupid. I got the hang of the ‘H’ sequence after a couple of times through, and my instructor settled in for his snooze.

Stupid isn’t a word that has any significance in a squirrel’s lexicon. Some homo sapiens think of them as stupid, but those boastful members of my own species are stupid themselves if they believe their IQ goes up in reverse proportion to the amount they downgrade the intelligence of another. Just try living off the land even for a week, eating nothing but acorns and berries, with no roof over your head, and predators crouched behind every bush and you’ll be able to make a more informed comment about who’s stupid and who isn’t.

However, squirrels do have a blind spot when it comes to cars. So it was I found myself barreling down the fast lane, bearing down on a black squirrel that was hippity-hopping across the highway toward the ditch on the other side. I eased into the slow lane—where I should have been in the first place—and hoped he’d remain frozen until I zoomed by. No such luck. He hopped right in front of me at the last second…

Being the smarty-pants you are, I’m sure you can guess what happened next. I eased further to the right, then farther again when the squirrel continued its suicidal progress. And again, until the passenger-side tires hit gravel. The VW lurched right, I overcorrected left, next thing I knew we were skidding sideways down the highway, a spray of gravel rattling under the floorboards and the front tires screeching over the asphalt.

My companion woke up with a start and looked out the front window, confused that the scenery was sliding by side to side instead of scrolling toward some vanishing point up the highway. I’ve lost count of the number of stupids that could be counted in that lick of time. All I can say is, none of them were the squirrel’s fault. It was just being a squirrel.

“What the…” my co-pilot managed.

Before he could complete the expletive, the back fender of the VW hit a post someone had carelessly planted in a spot they might have expected an errant, out-of-control Volkswagen to be sliding by. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! That was enough to tip us, sending the V-Dub into the clattering, shattering roll that would eject me out of my seat… no seatbelt, stupid… into my graceful arc.

I could describe my flight as a form of kinetic ballet; it did have a certain elegance to it if you could ignore the likely denouement. In retrospect, my slow-motion high dive seemed to be taking place in air that had thickened to the consistency of water—it felt as if I was swimming through the sky…

That ethereal sensation ended with a thud.

Next thing I knew I woke up in an ambulance, being prepped for a trip to the hospital.

Neither me nor my companion were seriously injured in the crash. And I do believe the squirrel survived unscathed. Our gurneys were parked side by side in the hospital emergency ward. His last words were: “Don’t tell them who was driving.” I deduced from the instruction that he had been tossed from his tumbling vehicle too, and preferred to accept full responsibility for my share of the overall stupidity.

I can’t say I learned my lesson that day… but that’s another story… well several of them, actually.

The Toast

Author, Craig Spence
Reader, Craig Spence
Production by Books Unbound

In this excerpt from Entrapment Lucinda MacDonald, her sisters Loretta and Louise, and their new friend Brenda Tanner celebrate their partnership as the guardian angels of Larry, the MacDonalds’ damaged brother, who Brenda has commissioned to do a mural on the outside back wall of her Inner Worlds gallery. It’s a transitional moment for Lucinda, and she breaks down…

Larry accepted Brenda’s offer.

“He bobbed his head and mumbled something like, ‘Sounds good,’ as if he was speaking from under a blanket with a mouthful of peanut butter,” she laughed. “I said to hell with it, grabbed him by the shoulders and hugged him hard, like a mother gorilla. He went stiff as a poker of course, but at least he didn’t struggle.”

“What part of him went stiff?” Louise joked.

We four hooted, raising our glasses in a toast to success. The ringing of our crystalline cluster-clink—barely audible over the rumble of passing traffic out on Wharf Street and the clatter of dishes in the sidewalk café—marked a beginning and an ending. Larry, dysfunctional genius that he was, had brought us MacDonald women back together as family.

Til death do you part, Echo intruded.

Shut the fuck up!

And, because of him, I had met Brenda, another love of my life…

I’ll shut the fuck up for now, Echo grumped.

And forever hold your peace! I snarked.

But it is getting kind of crowded in that heart locket of yours, don’t you think?

I said shut the fuck up!

When a glass breaks it makes a tickling sound. Hearts break silently within.

If you were real, I’d throttle you.

I am real…

“Lucinda?”

Brenda frowned, puzzled; my sisters looked on, concerned.

“You okay?”

“Oh!” I flustered. “I’m just a little overwhelmed.”

I wanted to take her hand, to kiss her a second time—or at least be kissed by her. I hated myself for feeling so desperately passionate, weakened by our celebratory moment. So pathetic!

“It’s going to be okay,” Brenda massaged my shoulder and the back of my neck.

“Let go,” Louise consoled.

“What?” I didn’t understand. What was I supposed to let go of?

“All these years, Luce, you’ve been the one who’s held us together. You’ve been our centre of gravity. Let go. We’re all grown up now. We’re fine. Even Larry, in his weird way, is becoming who he’s meant to be…” She paused; I waited. “You don’t have to be at the centre anymore, Luce; we’re all of us in mutual orbit, okay?”

I bowed my head, trembling, grateful, not wanting them to see me cry.

Loretta rounded the table, pressed her lips close to my ear, and whispered from behind, “Watch me spin, Sis.”

She flew away from us like a startled bird, weaving her way through and around the café tables, twirling out into Bastion Square. She couldn’t pirouette on pointe because she was wearing her sequinned thrift-store sandals. It didn’t matter. She floated effortlessly up and down the steps, buoyed by a musical spirit I couldn’t quite hear, but which I felt in every vibrant bone and nerve of my body. Some people stopped to watch her ballet; others hurried on, pretending not to notice.

“Oh my god!” Brenda gasped.

Gorgeous! Echo sighed.

“That’s because of you, Sis!” Loretta embraced me from behind when she’d flitted back to our table. “It’s all down to you!”

First Kiss

In this excerpt from Lucinda’s journal she and her sisters approach Inner Worlds Gallery owner Brenda Tanner to see if they can secure a safer lifestyle for their brother Larry. He’s been living on the street, earning money doing sketches and gaining a reputation as a graffiti artist. He’s pitched his tent in the gallery’s parking lot and started a mural on its back wall—getting enthusiastic approval from Brenda after the fact. The sisters want to talk to Brenda about Larry’s well-being, but Lucinda has someting else on her mind, too…

If Larry couldn’t be lured off the street, we’d make his homeless existence as safe and comfortable as possible. We approached Brenda with our plan because we wanted to do whatever we could to secure his place in her parking lot. “Of course he can stay there!” she countered. “Homelessness isn’t the same thing as placelessness. Larry MacDonald has a place right here!” She patted her left breast. “As long he wants to make my parking stall his home, he’s welcome.
“In fact, I’ve already talked to the tenants and owner of the building on the other side of my lot. I want to commission Larry to do a second mural on their wall. If they agree to it, and he accepts, he’ll be camped out in his patch of gravel for at least a year. Probably more.”
God! I wished in that moment I could stop loving Brenda so much. But I couldn’t help thinking and feeling like a romantic poet whenever I found myself within the ambit of her radiant being, a glow that suffused my waking and sleeping dreams. Shamelessly, I took advantage of her enthusiastic announcement to hug her; and she took advantage of my taking advantage by kissing me on the neck stepping back from that sudden embrace. I didn’t dare exchange a glance with my sisters, who had witnessed that subtle collapse of my known universe. I knew they knew; didn’t want them to know that I knew they knew, which would have entailed confused and embarrassing elaboration.
Some kisses are ephemeral—token gestures of affection that evaporate the instant they are bestowed; others stay with you, an intoxicant infusing your blood. I’ve never gotten over Brenda’s first kiss.

Candidates ask for your vote

Candidates participating in the April 15 all-candidates meeting addressed a long list of issues raised by the voters. Conservative Party of Canada candidate Jeff Kibble did not attend the meeting.

Cowichan-Malahat-Langford candidates speak to the issues

In his closing remarks, Liberal Party of Canada candidate Blair Herbert said to the audience at the Chemainus Residents Association’s all-candidates meeting that Conservative candidate Jeff Kibble, who did not attend, may have been told by Party Leader Pierre Poilievre to steer clear of community meetings.

“I want to address the elephant in the room,” Herbert said. “Or rather, the elephant that’s not in the room—the empty seat right here next to me, this comes down from the top.

“Poilievre has told his people, ‘Do not attend all-candidates meetings, and do not talk to the press.’ And I think that sends a message to me, and it sends a message to everybody in this room, and everybody in this riding, that the Conservative candidate is not interested in what you have to say now, and he’s not going to be interested in what you have to say if you send him to Ottawa.”

Herbert said national polls suggest that the April 28 federal election will be a contest between two parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives. He quoted former NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair as saying, ‘Trump’s threat to Canada means that the choice for Canada must be between the Liberals and the Conservatives.’

New Democratic Party candidate Alistair MacGregor asked the audience to think about his experience and achievements as their MP when they cast their votes. “What I offer to you folks is my service, my track record as your member of parliament,” he said, pointing to his nine-and-a-half years as their MP.

MacGregor said he’s had tremendous success as an opposition MP: bringing grocery chain executive Galen Weston before the Agriculture Committee to “face questioning on high food prices”; advocating in Parliament for a study that led to the strengthening of Canada’s Competition Bureau, which “…led the House of Commons to finally confront the corporate greed that is driving so much of the cost of living.”

He concluded that a strong contingent of NDP MPs is essential because the Liberal and Conservative parties are tied too closely to Corporate Canada. “You cannot trust them to look after your interests, which is why it is so important to have a strong contingent of New Democrats there, to keep those parties honest, but also to ensure that the issues that matter to you are given voice, whether it’s health care, the environment, or workers’ rights.”

Facing ongoing upheavals from the Trump administration in Washington, MacGregor said an experienced representative is needed in Ottawa. “With the uncertainty we are facing, Parliament is going to be recalled pretty quickly, you need someone in there who knows what to do from day one.”

Green Party of Canada candidate Kathleen Code said the three ‘status-quo’ parties have to be held accountable for the situation Canada finds itself in a quarter of the way through the 21st Century, and that it’s time for change.

“Here we are in 2025, look at the situation that we’re in and consider that it’s the three status-quo parties that have brought us to this point, where we can no longer afford our own lives,” she said. “I think that’s a really sad statement for us, to be where we are in a country as rich as Canada.”

She said, “We are the party of the people; we are not the party of the corporations, we don’t have any baggage, we don’t owe anything to anybody, we speak purely from the heart out of compassion and kindness and believe that we need to raise everybody up.”

It’s important to have a Green Party perspective at the table, she said.

She pointed to her experience and success as the Chair of the Eco Forestry Institute Society. “I’m part of the strategic team that took three years, raised a million dollars, and kept most of the Eco Forest in the public domain.” Code also cited her involvement in the Fairy Creek movement, an experience that gave her a deeper understanding of “how indigenous sovereignty, title, and rights work.”

“I know how government works, I know communications, I used to write a lot of briefing notes, and I’m simply a policy wonk, and I believe we really need this voice.”

The Chemainus Residents Association identified and asked the community to prioritize questions that would be put to candidates at the April 15 all-candidates meeting…

Blood Red

In this episode of Entrapment Lucinda and her son Manny visit her brother, who is creating a mural in a back alley in downtown Victoria, BC. Larry is living rough and homeless, and Lucinda hasn’t seen him for more than five years. Manny has never met his uncle. They are reconnected by Brenda Tanner, owner of the Inner Worlds Gallery and the back wall where Larry’s imagined world view is emerging stroke by stroke. Ten years on, Manny will compose a poem entitled Blood Red memorializing this encounter….

“Oh my god, aren’t you handsome?”

I liked Brenda Tanner the moment I met her. Liked her so much it felt sort of awkward because I didn’t have a right to feel so intimate so fast. She had stooped on her haunches to introduce herself to Manny, who was obviously thrilled to have a grownup—a beautiful, charming, cultured grownup—treat him like royalty. He giggled and beamed.

“Hi,” I said, interrupting their moment. “I’m Lucinda… Lucinda MacDonald.”

She took a moment to squeeze Manny’s shoulder, then stood up, turning toward me. Her delightfully startled, wide-open greeting took my breath away.

“Larry’s sister?” she asked.

I nodded, entranced by the musical timbre of her voice. Everything about her made me shiver with envy and joy. How can anyone be so beautiful, I wondered.

“I’m so glad you’ve come,” she touched my arm consolingly.

“He’ll be pleased to see you, and…?” She glanced down at Manny.

“That’s his nephew, Manny,” I said. “They’ve never met.”

“Well, let’s set that straight. I was just closing up, so let me get my keys.”

“There’s a gate…”

“I know. I lock the parking lot up at night.” She explained that Larry got in and out via a back lane, wriggling through a narrow opening between a chainlink fence and his wall. “If he wasn’t so skinny, he could never do it.”

The remark nudged gently. How did Larry get so skinny? And how did he get so lost?

“Has he told you anything about his past? His family life?”

Brenda chuckled, “Larry’s not much of a talker. He speaks with his brush for the most part.”

“It’s a long story, a horror story. I’m not surprised he hasn’t put it into words.”

Rattling the gate open, Brenda ushered us into the parking lot. “He might be in his tent,” Brenda guessed, nodding toward a blue fabric dome at the far end of the lot. For a moment I felt like a mendicant approaching some sort of sanctifying shrine to do homage. I shrugged the thought off. “Larry?” Brenda coaxed as we approached. “You’ve got visitors.”

No response. The tent remained perfectly still, the hunched form of a frightened animal waiting to be attacked. “Larry,” she repeated softly, then gestured for me to say something, inclining her head toward the tent.

“Larry, it’s Lucinda. Please. I’d love to see you. We’ve missed you.”

For a moment, silence; then the rustling of fabric; then a relapse into silence.

“I’ve brought your nephew Manny with me. He’d like to meet you.”

More rustling; then a hand unzipped the tent’s flap; and Larry’s head popped out like a prairie dog’s. Squinting, he looked at Brenda, then me, then Manny, and smiled—a crooked, broken smile, but at least we had something to fix, something to work on.

I collapsed onto my knees and took his head in my hands. “I love you,” I whispered, trying my best not to cry. “Please let me love you!”

Manny edged up close to us. I couldn’t see him but felt his tiny presence, then his hand on my neck, and his other hand on Larry’s neck, and his cheek against my scalp. “And Manny loves you, too,” I smiled—the most pathetic, feeble smile I could summon, hoping that they could feel my joy as we huddled in our clumsy embrace, shipwrecked under a sea of sky.

Larry took us on a tour of his mural.

“He’s speaking!” Brenda whispered.

The words tumbled out of him awkwardly, as if he was an immigrant with a poor command of English. And his stuttering made him stall and start like a misfiring engine, but he was excited to be showing Manny his wall and pushed through his shyness and disability. “Th… th… thaaat’s Wharf Street,” he pointed to the centre of the scene. Victoria’s skyline, looking north, formed a jagged edge running the entire length of the parking lot.

The thought occurred to me that Manny could have walked up that imaginary road into the painting’s vanishing point about a third of the way up the wall.

“What’s there?” Manny pointed up at the white brickwork of the Inner Worlds gallery.

“Tha… tha… thaaat’s going to be the sky.”

“Wouldn’t all those bricks fall down and kill all those people in the street?” Manny giggled.

Larry laughed. Not the condescending laughter of an adult who knew better, but the conspiratorial hooting of a friend. “Well,” he said. “We just have to save the day, aaa.. aaa… and paint those bricks away. Poof! Gone!” He gestured grandly with a sweep of his arm. “We’ll make them into a black fabric sky, then poke some holes through it so people can see the starlight, then set it on fi… fi… fire at the end of Wharf Street with a blazing red ball of a sun.”

Manny scrunched his face into a mischievous frown. “But the sun’s over there,” he challenged, pointing west, over the rim of our brick-and-mortar-canyon toward the glare of the late afternoon sun. ‘And you can’t see stars in daytime.”

“Why,” Larry huffed. “I can put the sun anywhere I want. It can shine out anyone’s ar… ar… armpit…”

We all laughed at his teasing schtick.

“Aaa… aaa… as for the stars, only people with imaginations can see ‘em shining in broad daylight. People like you!” He pointed like a revivalist preacher issuing a godly commandment at my son, smirking at his own drama.

Never had I seen Manny look so pleased with himself. So proud!

“Tell you what,” Larry said. “When the time comes, I’ll get you to put a few stars in that black-velvet sky. Whaa… whaa… Whaddya think of that?”

“Yes!” Manny pumped his fist.

Brenda beamed, radiant as a gentle sun in our shadowed courtyard. I couldn’t help loving her, wanting her, but suppressed that secret desire, crushed it because I was afraid my love would destroy her, and me with her. I wasn’t even sure we could become friends but was prepared to put up with my yearning just so I could be close to her.

I’m haunted by that wondrous reunion with my brother. If things hadn’t ended the way they did, I might have let it settle in my subconscious, like a photo pressed between the pages of a family album. But things did come to an awful end, and that memory has become an inflaming spirit, burning through me like the blood-red sun that spills its molten light down Wharf Street in Larry’s mural. Ten years on, Manny memorialized that painting in a poem.

Blood Red

I’m walking down the avenue
In the middle of my day,
Thinking nothing’s old; nothing’s new
Which means I’ve lost my way.
Don’t know where I’m going
Don’t know what’s worth knowing
There’s no such thing as growing,
Everything stays the same.

People come; people go
We laugh, we drink, we clap, we cheer
Stand loud ovations to end our shows,
Though nothing’s changed, and nothing’s clear
We can’t know where we’re going
And there’s not a thing worth knowing
And there’s no such thing as growing
In this for-ever-saken here.

I imagined once a blood-red ball,
A blistering nova casting rays
Erupting atop a star-lit wall
Exploding my day-today.
I’d forgotten where I’m going,
Had lost what once was knowing,
Was shrunken, inward-growing,
In a world become deranged.

Cyclotron

Cyclotron

Pedal to the metal
gonna go for a ride.
Pedal to the metal,
gonna glide, glide, glide.

Pedal to the metal
don’t know where I’ve been.
Pedal to the metal,
I’m a spinning machine.

Pedal to the metal,
gonna leave the past behind.
Pedal to the metal
gonna find what I can find.

Pedal to the metal,
just watch me go.
Pedal to the metal…
Where? I just don’t know.

Pedal to the metal,
wave the world goodbye.
Pedal to the metal,
tilt into the sky.

Ya, it’s a good good feeling,
taking to the road,
a good, good feeling
shucking that load
when I pedal to the metal,
and glide, glide, glide.

Naked Truth

Naked Truth

I do love walking barefoot

inside my shoes and socks,

to feel the ground beneath my soles

and sense what I am not.

To walk the earth quite naked,

cloaked in shirt and tie,

warmed by the sun upon my back

beneath my slice of sky.

I never feel embarrassed

to show just who I am

to all my fellow creatures

alive upon this land.

They’re my boon companions,

although they’re poorly dressed.

They scrabble, claw, and bite, and chew,

and do their very best

to survive upon this planet,

this spinning ball of dust,

that is our one and only home,

in the universe of us.

Craig Spence