“I’ve been following your tracks from the place you turned around, an’ I kept losing them in the snow, then I’d find them again.” “But why did you come back?” “Because I kind of guessed you wouldn’t go back home. You broke your promise, Rachael.” She hung her head. “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. I just couldn’t go back, I was too scared.” Ronnie put his hand on her shoulder. “S’all right, kid, I know. Don’t worry about it.” “But I’ve got us lost,” Rachael wailed. “I don’t even know where we are. I was trying to find the farm. Where are we, Ronnie?” He looked around at a landscape that was quickly disappearing. “Well, we’re not on any main road, that’s for sure. I figure we’re about two miles out of town, going north or maybe more west. There has to be a farm around here somewhere, and we have to find shelter or we’ll freeze. Come on, let’s go.” With that, he took a big breath, hoisted Bobby onto his shoulders and set off. Meekly, but with more confidence than she had felt since he left them, Rachael followed.
“We can do a lot better if we change our direction and if we stick together, Robert,” Peter says. Robert Major, who has somehow got the picture and who cares only for himself, asks, “Alright, you guys want to take it and drive it, where do you think you can take it? How far do you think you can go without Lorne? What tells me you can do better than he?” Peter sips his beer, “We have a group of financiers on hand to bring in a good chunk of fresh money. We have a public relations company ready to work with us and we can get much more attention for our stock price. We can achieve a lot more than what Lorne can; it’s as simple as that.” “Alright boys, then tell me who is going to eat up all the stock that Lorne and his pals have on hand? Are you going to let it float out in the market? If you do that, you sign a death warrant for the price of the shares for a long time, you know that,” Robert insists. Hakim listens to their comments, and knowing this moment would have come sooner or later, turns to Robert and lets him know that Lorne is not a stupid man and has no ego problem. He tells Robert that Lorne will simply try to get the best under the circumstances because he knows he and Ibrahim have a lot more shares than all the others combined, and because he also knows he cannot get into a proxy fight with a billionaire. He’ll simply stick around for the longest time and try to grab the most shares possible from the market. That’s how Lorne is going to play and they all agree on that. On the other hand, Hakim suggests they can always offer him a golden carrot. “Yes, but Lorne is not one who will take a carrot, Hakim. He knows the game as well as you. Would you do what you expect him to do?” “Yes, I would. There’s always another car coming down the tracks, as the saying goes. But Robert, you have to understand this is a course we’d like to take, no matter what it’s going to cost. The money is available and time is on our side. The financiers Peter referred to are our people and money from them comes only if and when we run the show. The public relations company is our reference and they sign with us only when we run the show. We have the ability to take this company to the shareholders’ meeting in a month and a half. However, if you come along we don’t even need to call one; we can speed up the process and save a tonne of the company’s money, in the process.” Robert realizes that the blood is ready to be spread and wants to have his share of the spoils. He can always play hard to get for a while and try to squeeze them for something extra. “In other words, you have to have me along. Okay then, what are you offering?”
Roy Great Falls Auction Mart Great Falls, Montana “Afternoon ladies.” “Hello Mr. Hooper,” came the welcoming voices of five ladies seated at their desks. The woman seated closest to the counter then continued, “I’m sorry that Cindy isn’t here right now. She is picking up some office supplies for us.” “Oh, thanks. I was actually here to see Roy. Is he available?” “He sure is. He is around here someplace. If you go out that door and walk down the alley between the pens you are bound to run into him sooner or later. He is helping the boys sort the cattle for tomorrow’s sale.” “Thank you ladies.” Joel headed for the cattle pens. It didn’t take him long to find Roy—Joel wasn’t a hundred yards outside the door, down a narrow channel that ran straight to the back of the yard with corrals off both sides, when he heard a shout from across the yard, “Joel! Are you looking for me?” Joel appreciated that the manager of the auction yard recognized him. After all, he had only been here twice: the first time when he brought the mare in for the sale and the second time when he picked up Cindy for lunch. As the big man nimbly scrambled over the fences, Joel was put at ease by his friendly smile. “Good to see you, Joel,” said Roy. “Cindy is out doing some errands right now.” Why does everyone seem to think that they have to report on…
A painting that goes in hockey arenas, that is toured across the country from one end to the other, telling the story. Then a whole flood of ideas and memories came into my mind crystal clear. Grandmother doing her dance and her song in the winter – becoming mesmerized and overcome by heat and emotion – going outside and the Northern Lights roaring overhead – and she came out and stood beside me and put her arm in mine and told me that those were the spirits of her ancestors dancing. And she sensed the difficulties I was having over the loss of the two women that I had loved so profoundly. She had said, “It’s a good thing to let them go and dance”. During her song and her story, there had been the need of an Isumataq – a person or an object in whose presence wisdom might show itself. The painting would be called Isumataq. And the dream driving all of this was Nunavut. That was the moment in which the whole thing exploded in one clear vision. It must have been working quietly in my brain all this time and now here it was – all together. Now it poured out and it all came together like a jigsaw puzzle – every piece moved into its proper slot. Covered in sweat, Ken’s body shook with nervous energy. His whole being thrilled and he felt himself to be outside his body – completely outside space and time. The vision was so clear, so compelling, that it possessed him. He knew it would come to own him – night and day – and he didn’t care. He gave himself up to it. He paced back and forth, details of Isumataq whirling in his mind and dropping into place like numbers on a slot machine. He drove home that night with a new excitement coursing through him. When he told Marsha he was going to create a giant painting on the scale of the Sistine Chapel, she smiled and shook her head. In the morning he told Diane who began to plan a studio renovation to accommodate such an enormous painting. While they were hunched over the sketch, Salvador appeared in the doorway, a bottle of brandy in his hand, and a smile on his face. “I have the equipment, the idea, the staff, and the availability of rock. How would you like a giant Inukshuk in your studio?” Three days later, Salvador pulled up in a new Saab, followed by a flatbed truck – groaning under the weight of massive blocks of granite – and two extended cab pickups loaded with burly men. At two in the morning, after hours of heavy labour, a seven-foot tall Inukshuk towered over the studio. Salvador waved his arm at it like a magician wielding a wand. “There. Is it to your liking?” “It’s perfect,” Ken said. Salvador’s next project was an Inukshuk at the Columbus Centre! Dragging Ken and Joseph Carrier to the lobby, he gestured grandly…
had been told what to do if Nora Carrick took one of these seizures. Yet they all stood back along the grey walls, and the children ran to a safe distance and watched with eyes and mouths wide open while the young girl’s legs jerked up and down, and her head struck the ground, and her mouth opened and closed expelling a kind of froth like a rabid animal. Joe saw what was happening as he reached the square on his way home from the harbour. He rushed forward, wrapped Nora in his jacket and placed his pen-knife between her teeth. He remembered Dr Alexander’s saying she could bite her tongue during this stage of her fit unless something like a fountain pen was thrust between her teeth on one side of her mouth. With one knee on the ground, Joe held Nora against the other while her convulsive movements began to subside. He wiped her face clean with a handkerchief. He had seen that face so many times before but never till that moment did he notice how pretty it was. Her eyes below the straight-cut fringe of hair were closed. She had rather prominent cheek-bones and a dimple at each side of her mouth when she smiled. She was not smiling then. Her cheek rested against his dark-blue jersey as if she were listening to his heartbeat. Her black hair smelled sweetly with a soft fragrance as if freshly washed with a scented soap. That smell lingered in his nostrils for days, and each time it came back to him it brought exciting new feelings, like those he used to feel in his stomach at the approach of Christmas or a birthday or at the prospect of an outing. And yet different too. More subtle, more gentle, and somehow infinitely sweeter. And he would recall the pale, round face framed in its black, shiny, scented hair pressed against his heart, and the eyes flickering open, so dark and deep and troubled those young, serious eyes. Joe could not remember if he had felt then the same exquisite feelings he had had later when, unbidden, the picture of Nora’s face returned to fill his mind for days on end. Nor could he remember if he had noticed then the rounded outline of her young breasts which he later recalled as having been in contact with his heaving chest. How momentous those few minutes had been for him, and yet how many of the minor details he had been oblivious to at the time. Perhaps the significance of the scene had been a later invention. He remembered how the crowd had closed in around him, and everyone looked at the peaceful body in his arms as Nora awoke from her frightening ordeal. Had she taken his hand and held it till Dr Alexander came and led her to his car? Joe thought she had but now he wasn’t sure. He remembered standing in the square with his jacket hanging over his arm, watching Dr Alexander’s car drive away …
The Best of Friends ALL I KNEW ABOUT ETERNITY in those days came to me through the agency of its little cousin, boredom. It was Friday and it was spring. The big windows on the left side of our second floor classroom had been lifted as far as the old paint in their grooves would allow. All afternoon, an intermittent breeze came through the protective metal grill carrying coal gas and bus fumes and the oddly fishy odour of soap from the Colgate factory down by the river. It wasn’t much, but it was news from the world and I sniffed it with a perverse pleasure. We weren’t allowed to look outside, but as often as I could I snuck a peek at the vacant lot with its bottle chips, rusty concrete, patches of crabgrass, and minute particles of coal that lay in thin drifts where the wind had blown them from the smoke of locomotives that passed all day on the elevated tracks across the street, beyond the wooden fence of the Delaware-Lackawanna coal yard. Sister Violeta, with her lugubrious monotone and her black visions of life before death, seemed connected somehow to the nearly purple hills (piles, really) of pea coal, which I had a privileged view of at this height. They looked like black sand blown up into dunes in the desert landscape of an alien planet. I used to imagine she had been hatched there. Father Brackendorf, who came every Friday to teach us religion, was fond of looking out toward the coal yard and explaining that our souls were like the snow before a train went by. Once we were born, the soot came down. Scrubbing did no good. You had to let confession melt the snow, and let the sin fall to the bottom. (The bottom of what, I wondered). Then a blast of grace would freeze it white again. This is what he was saying now. It made me feel empty and restless. The clock above his head, round and white and edged with black, was soft-clicking back and hard-clicking forward, minute by minute. And then the minute hand hit twelve and it was three o’clock, and we were free. But there was this debt I owed to Danny Amoroso. He was three or four years older than we were, but he was slow. And he seemed to enjoy it. Being slow, I mean. He was a titan among …
MANY of us couldn’t ever recognize him, some things remained forever unknown, however as we slowly started forgetting we brought him near us; years went by; it was beautiful and him, they said, owner of old treasures since he oen stayed in foreign houses into which others entered only from the street, “then, why you ask me?” I said to him; thus people retained good memory of the family, especially during the evenings; in fact they found the bed-sheet the old women used to wrap him, since his difficulty was which direction to take and since darkness was slowly falling I thought I had to save him so I went to the garden where I sat quietly.
which Will had taken up his position at the desk. Only the monotonous tick of the pendulum clock on the waiting room wall, and the occasional tap tap of telegraph keys disturbed the quiet. And once in a while Will Andrews cleared his throat. Try as he would Will could not keep his eyes off her. His curiosity grew with the minutes but he did not think it his place to ask who she was waiting for. He just wished the tardy individual would hurry up and get there. He didn’t think he should leave the young woman alone to go to his quarters, although his feet now screamed to be released from his boots, and his throat felt parched just thinking about Molly’s lemonade. He pulled his watch from the fob pocket of his trousers. Half past four. Half an hour since the train had passed through town, and its passenger – who had expected to be met – still waited. A faint sound startled him and he looked up to see the woman crossing the room towards the wicket. She appeared cool and composed but Will could see the lines down her cheeks where rivulets of sweat had streaked her face powder. “Excuse me, Mr. ah ….” “Andrews.” “Mr. Andrews, I wonder if you could tell me if the train was early today.” “Nope, right on time as usual.” “Oh … I see … thank you.” She bit her lower lip and turned away but suddenly she swung around to face him again. “Mr. Andrews, would you mind placing a telephone call for me, please? It would be a local call.” “Sure. Who to?” “Fielding. Mr. Benjamin Fielding.” Will’s mouth dropped open. “Ben Fielding?” She brightened. “Yes. Do you know him?” “Ben Fielding ain’t got a phone.” “Oh.” She said it so quietly he scarcely heard her. Her lips trembled, and the hand resting on the counter, still gloved, began to shake just a little. Again she turned to go but she stopped when he said, “Can I get my missus to bring you a glass of lemonade? I was just going in for some.”
Nicholas: Special Withdrawal Unit I have to get it all down. For the record, the Akashic Record of the Aeons, naturally. Wherein all our phantasms are inscribed, squiggles of amoebic neon in the starry darkness, every damned thing we’ve done radiating across eternity like an old broadcast of Journey into Space on its way to the Pleiades. And I have to set the angelic record quite straight. Writing very carefully. Not my usual psychedelic scribble—letterforms in doodles of wild purple, loopy loan-words on the run—but disciplined blocks of sensible words, arranged thus, line after neat line in my black-and-red Notebook, made in Taiwan but purchased for me at the hospital shop right here at Oakhill, sunniest hotbed of sanity in all Devon, as Doctor Jago says, whenever he tries to jolly us along. It’s very civilised, “. . . considering, after all, Mr. Beardsley, it is a locked-up ward, yes?” He allows me the privilege of unlocking my old word-hoard in its frumpy box of smelly brocade, my little shop of curious relics. I’m permitted this verb therapy, joining up my grown-up writing. Better this, certainly, than farting in the day-room all day, like old Beddowes, or wandering about strumming a cardboard cut-out guitar, which is the preferred pose of Rog, or Rod, or Rob, or Ron—I haven’t yet made out his name, because our mass dosage of Largactil makes everybody’s speech slurred. In fairness to Beddowes, such drugs doth make great farters of us all, our sulphurous bursts of bad air permeate the lower heavens . . . Perhaps it’s really Beddowes’ high boredom quotient that’s against him. His preferred interpretation of reality is that he’s Headmaster of a large inner-city comprehensive school, that our day-room is his staff-room, and that we, fellow-clients of the Special Withdrawal Unit, are his backsliding, incompetent staff. “You’ve no control,” he wags a warning finger several times a day, “no control at all of your juvenile criminal elementals. Young people committing problems of evil, terrible state of things in the toilets, boys with knives, and tinsel in their hair, hair everywhere . . . Look what you have permitted at the end of the day, you with all your beards and long hair . . .” With me he always permutates the same set phrases, beards and all. Even the stuffy acoustic of the day-room can’t take the edge off his abrasive burr, but it goes nicely with his jowly blue-shaven red face and bald scalp with plastered licks of thin hair. He likes to grab some old copy of Plain Truth Magazine, and he rolls it up to …
how many more times he would be called upon to rescue his headstrong sister from danger. Mentally, he checked off the incidents that had landed Rachael in trouble throughout their childhood. The day he had stopped Bill Harrison, the man he then thought to be his dad, from giving her a serious beating. That day, Ronnie had taken the beating in her place. The time Rachael took four-year-old Bobby and ran away from their temporary home at the Harrisons, into the middle of the worst prairie blizzard the Alberta community had seen in years. That time Ronald lost fingers, toes and part of an ear – and almost lost his life – in an effort to save them. It grieved him to know that Rachael still felt guilt over his loss. So many times he had tried to tell her it was not her fault, nor was it her fault that Bobby, too, had lost fingers and toes as a result of the storm. She said she believed him, but he had seen her recoil sometimes when she looked at his hands, or saw his feet when they were swimming in Emblem Lake. He knew her reaction didn’t stem from squeamishness – no girl he knew was less squeamish than his sister. No, it was the knowledge that she had led both him and Bobby into a situation that could have taken – and almost did take – all of their lives. But right now there were more immediate concerns. How could he make Rachael understand that Tim, no matter how innocent, no matter how gentle he had always been, at eighteen years old had a youth’s hormones raging through his system? No doubt Rachael was right – Tim Buckley would not knowingly hurt her. He had been her playmate since she and Bobby had been adopted by Morley and Tyne Cresswell eight years earlier. The Buckleys lived not more than half a mile across the fields from the Cresswell farm, a fact that accounted for the well worn path between the two houses. Ronald, while working in the fields, had often seen Rachael and Bobby on their way to the Buckley farm. But he had rarely seen Tim coming alone in the other direction. Only when he had company did his parents allow the mentally challenged boy to leave their yard. Now, however, Tim came and went at will.
Manolis Aligizakis 