Tag: #creative-writing

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]

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!”