Tag: writing

He Rode Tall

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

“That may be true, but we have to be at the top of our game.
We won’t have a chance to do much training in Oklahoma City,
you know.”
“Tell you what, Joel. If you think this horse of yours needs
training by the time you get to Oklahoma City, then you are riding
the wrong horse, cowboy. This horse has every move in it
right now that it will ever need in Oklahoma City. The only question
is about your ability to draw those moves out of the
horse—how to ask for the right maneuver in the right way at the
right time. And none of that has anything to do with constant
rundowns and long slides. It is all about being in tune with your
horse. You have never seen me mad, but if you don’t take that
horse out to the pasture for a nice gentle ride, you are going to see
one very upset horsewoman. Do you understand me, Joel
Hooper?”
It was Tanya saying his full name that really got his attention.
He knew she was speaking from the heart. But he was the mature
adult here, and up until a few months ago, she was a struggling
teenage horse trainer, but he knew she was right.
“Tanya, you just amaze me. So much wisdom and so much
power in one young woman. I can’t wait to see what happens to
you when you grow up. Whatever it is, I know that it is going to
be something very special. And I am going to be able to say that I
knew Tanya way back when she was a nineteen-year-old just out
of high school.”
“Get out of here, Joel Hooper. Go ride your horse.”
And he did. Not only did he take it easy for the rest of the week
but also for the rest of the month as they prepared for the show.
Sure, there were days when he would run the patterns on the big
buckskin gelding, but even then he was only going at three-quarter
speed and saving the extra for when it was really needed.
For Tanya, it was pretty much the same: she would work hard
some days, but most days Tanya would lope a few circles with her
horse, work on something specific, like a spin or a lead change,
and then head straight for the hills.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562862

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0980897955

Jazz with Ella

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

Ivan Nikolaevich, the second rate agent. Still, she wanted the director to know that she had been correct in her suspicions.
“Da, da, yes, of course,” nodded the functionary, pawing through his desk drawer searching for something. The man’s an idiot, she thought. This is the quality of worker who stands guard over the country! Saints preserve us, as my old grandmother used to say. Finally, the man produced another form, this one on blue paper. “In order to use the official phone line, you must fill in this form.”
“Phone him now!” Natasha raised her voice in hopes that the supervisor would hear her and look out his door. “I’m not filling in one more form!”
The man’s expression did not change but this time he abandoned the new form, picked up the receiver and asked her for the number. After some dialling, waiting and dialling again, he announced that he could not get through. He replaced the receiver quietly. “The supervisor will attend to your complaint tomorrow,” he told her.
Natasha struggled to control her breathing. “Tomorrow WILL BE TOO LATE. She’s passing through the line now; I can see her from here.” Indeed, Lona had already slipped through the passport control while they had been on the phone. The young man’s face creased in a troubled frown. “Very well, comrade. I will take the name of the tourist and her flight number and pass it on to the customs officials myself.”
Now we’re getting somewhere, Natasha thought. “I’ll go with you,” she said aloud. She took a certain perverse pleasure in being in on the moment of discovery. Of course the poor fool Chopyk would be angry with her…
“I’m sorry, comrade, that will not be possible,” the guard replied. “It is not permitted to pass through that door into the airport again. You must leave by the fire exit.” He gestured at a door on the far side of the room. “It is a regulation. Thank you and good day.”
Natasha drew herself up to her full five feet, four inches, cast one more withering glare at the man, and stalked toward the fire exit and out of the lives of the tour group from Canada.
“Documents, please.” Jennifer watched as Lona, standing in front of her, tensed at the command. She could feel her own apprehensiveness growing as she waited, her toes behind the yellow line. This first barrier marked Passport Control was a preview to the inspection room.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562892

Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

His scaffold was built, ladders leaned against the walls, tubes of paint –
by the carton – were stacked in the studio, and alarm clocks ticked beside
his narrow cot. He was ready to begin painting.
I felt very, very much that things had now solidified. This was now a fact,
and for the first time in this entire campaign, I actually knew that I was going
to make it – not only the painting, but also my fight for Nunavut. This
was it. It was now only a matter of physical labour to complete the vision.
There was a different feeling now. The desperation was gone, and there was
only a huge engine driving me. Now, there was only confidence. Now, I had
access to politicians, business people, media – an infrastructure so massive
and on such a personal level that I would be able to get this story through
and by hook or by crook it would come into being.
It occurred to him is his newfound euphoria – “We need to celebrate!”
He announced the “First Brushstroke” party and invitations went out in
the shape of artist’s palettes that hit the desk of every media contact in the
city. Every couple of days a new invitation in a different colour, embossed
with an Inukshuk, went into the mail. He called Keith and told him to
fill a plane with choice Arctic food. Bob Engels, the North’s most famous
bush pilot, volunteered to fly the northern contingent to Toronto. On
an evening in early September 1986, Ken climbed up on a ladder, from
which he made a speech to a roomful of people, and then splashed a giant
brushstroke across the towering, white canvas.
Then he settled into a routine that was to last for almost a year. He
painted the sky for several hours, slept for two hours, went back to work,
and then slept for two hours. As he painted he had a sense that this was
what he was meant to do – to paint on this scale. Every other painting
seemed too small – even the giant canvas that hung at First Canadian
Place was undersized. How could he ever go back to painting something
on a lesser scale? What he really wanted to do was buy Saskatchewan and
paint it from helicopters.
One day a woman, wrapped in a fur coat, swished in on stiletto heels.
She glanced around the studio and waved her arm at some paintings leaning
against the far wall. “I’ll have that one, and that one, and that one.”
“Madam,” Ken said from his perch on the scaffold. “I don’t know who
you are. I suspect you know who I am or you think you do. I would invite
you to go outside, take a walk around, come back in, and say – ‘Good
morning!’”
She took a step back. “Well! I have never been spoken to that way before!”
Ken waved his hand. “Go on! Go. Shoo… Shoo.”
She stalked out, and returned ten minutes later. “Good morning,” she said.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562830

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073573

Redemption

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

It seemed that the dean had learned this
speech by heart and repeated it like a parrot, irrelevant what was the
country’s current situation.
Hermes sat next to Eleni, feeling bored and angry: under the
junta, things were not good at all, and they wouldn’t get any better
any time soon; and the graduates were not going to do better than
the previous ones. If nothing was done, things were only going to
get worse. Hermes tried very hard to be attentive, and when his name
was called, he got up and walked slowly to the dean, who smiled and
shook his hand before handing him the “holy” paper.
Hermes nodded his head and smiled politely at the dean and
the rest of the officials, as well as his professors. Deep inside him,
Hermes felt the urge to stand up in front of them and give them a
real piece of his mind, but he knew it was not his time yet, so he went
back to his seat. His head throbbed from the tension, which Eleni
sensed as she also sensed that he was absorbed in his own world, so
she asked,
“Are you okay? You look like you don’t like being here.”
“I have this bad headache. My head is really hurting.”
“This thing is just about over. We’ll go soon.”
He nodded, and indeed the ceremony was quickly over, and
the people started to disperse. He and Eleni rose from their seats and
walked toward the exit.
At the door, George, a clerk from the secretary’s office, stopped
them.
“Again, congratulations, young man,” he said to Hermes.
“Oh, thank you, George.”
“The dean would like to see you before you go.”
Surprised, Hermes left Eleni and followed the secretary in the
long hallway to the dean’s office. He knocked at the door and entered.
The head of the university welcomed him and praised him for all the
good work he had done. After all, Hermes was the student with the
highest marks in his class.
Hermes waited for the dean to get to the point.

https://draft2digital.com/book/4172538#print

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763858

The Circle

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

The next morning they wake to a knock on their door around nine. It is another
very bright, warm morning with the sun up on the horizon, setting the sky on
fire, like the fire they shared last night. Birds of various sizes and colors fly over
the area chirping and speaking erotic words and sighs as if suddenly an abundant
peace has spread over the world, as if everyone has forgotten about the war
games and their aftermath.
Emily puts on a pair of shorts and t-shirt; she’s still under the spell of the
previous night’s excitement with the pleasure of being on top or on her side or
under Talal, and all that rocking of the boat all night long every time another
boat went by. But it’s this brightness that mostly amazes her, and she cannot
believe her eyes which are shielded behind sunglasses, not only to protect them
from the sunshine but so that they won’t reveal the secrets of what happened the
previous night beneath the spell of the waves. Could anyone live here for a long
time? She wonders when she remembers the exchange between Talal and
Ibrahim yesterday. Yes, she would love to live here for a long time, with Talal
going up and down the gulf seeing all this beauty and enjoying one another the
same way as last night. Then a new voice comes to her and encourages her with
the statement: you can be happy any place on the globe as long as you are happy
with yourself and with the man you love. The one who dreams of a paradise far
away in a dream location has never enjoyed lovemaking the way you did last
night. Yes, she could live here for a long time, as long as Talal would like, because
her life and happiness are close to this man with the sad eyes and the sweetest
voice.
Ibrahim and Mara are already at the small table at the stern. Talal and Emily
join them for coffee and toast.
“Good morning to you,” Ibrahim says, smiling.
“Good morning, good morning,” Emily and Talal say.
“How was your sleep, my dear?” Mara asks Emily.
“It was wonderful, thank you, Mara.”
Mohamed has started cruising along the smooth water of the Gulf, taking a
southerly direction. Rassan and Abdul sit back and relax while Surnia serves
them breakfast.
They travel for an hour until they come to a place where a couple of small
bays provide plenty of area with smooth, quiet water, away from the rush of
other passing yachts. Mohamed turns off the engine and releases the anchor.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562817

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978186524

Fury of the Wind

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

Sarah smiled. “Oh surely, Ben, they wouldn’t ban movies in Nimkus
because they thought they were sinful. I think you’re exaggerating.”
“Yeah? Well, you don’t know them yet, do you?”
She shrugged and got up to clear the table. “Can we go to a movie
in Bradshaw sometime, Ben?”
“Maybe. We’ll see.” He got up to fill his pipe.
She could hardly wait until he went back to work. Finishing up
the dishes quickly, she shoved her feet into a pair of old runners and
went to find him.
In the yard, almost bare of vegetation between the house and the
horse stable, the dust swirled and danced in the incessant wind.
What few patches of grass remained were being uprooted by the
chickens that scratched happily in the earth all day long. She paused
for a moment when she passed the chicken house, a building as
dilapidated as the others around it. There had once been some sort
of wire mesh fence to contain the fowl, but it had long since rusted
and fallen apart. Now the chickens had free range of the yard. No
wonder the coyotes came so close to the house, especially with no
dog to run them off.
A grey tabby cat, sunning itself in front of the cow stable, looked
up at Sarah’s approach then skittered through the door which hung
on one hinge. Inside the stable a calf bawled, but she resisted the
urge to go in to see it. She wanted to find Ben before he got too far
away.
She found him behind the buildings, hitching an old tractor to
a sickle mower. She stood and watched for a few minutes before he
glanced up and saw her.
Sarah shouted above the roar of the motor, “I’d like to see Flicka.
Can you tell me where she is?”
“I haven’t time to be bothered now. I want to start cutting hay
over yonder.” He nodded towards what Dave McNeill had called
the north pasture.
“I don’t want to take you from your work, Ben. If you’ll tell me
where she is, I’ll find her.”
“Over there in the field.”
She followed his gaze to where three horses were standing near a
small dry slough bed in the shade of a stand of poplar trees.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073530

The Unquiet Land

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

“In what way is he different?” Padraig’s knees, as he sat on the wooden chair, touched Caitlin’s momentarily. He turned to one side and crossed his legs. “I can’t imagine Finn ever changing.”
He said this to reassure Caitlin, but his voice held little conviction. He recalled the wrinkles and the grizzled hair, the tired eyes and the wasted face. He remembered the bitterness that Finn could not hide on the night of the homecoming party and the violent anger on the day he ordered Padraig out of the house. And Padraig heard, as he had a thousand times, Finn’s deep voice saying, “I’m not only ailing, Padraig. The truth is, I’m dying.” He had lived more than a full year since then.
“Finn should have died a long time ago,” Dr Starkey told Padraig. “But that old warrior doesn’t know how to quit.” Sadly the doctor shook his head. “He won’t be fighting death much longer though. Not now. He’s taken too much punishment, Padraig. The referee’s about to stop the contest.”
“How much longer?” Padraig asked, instantly apprehensive.
“I am not the referee,” Dr Starkey replied. “By my watch the fight should already have ended. Personally I’d have stopped it long ago. As it is, I’d give Finn days now, rather than weeks. Certainly not another month. Even with treatment, if he’d ever agree to it. Which he won’t, of course.”
God won’t let him die yet, Padraig thought to himself, his apprehension mounting to panic. He can’t. I have to complete my mission first. I have to save Finn’s soul before God destroys his corrupt old body.
“My father is a sick man.” Caitlin’s voice brought Padraig back to the present. “I can sense it now. Perhaps it is something that has been going on for years, like the erosion of land by the sea. But lately it’s begun to show. And his personality is changing.”
“In what way is it changing, Caitlin?”
“I… I don’t rightly know, Padraig. I don’t know. Perhaps age has at last caught up with him. Perhaps he sees death coming and he’s frightened.”
“Do you really think so?”
Caitlin thought of the painting on the wall for a moment, her concentration fixed on the tallest of the three black crosses. “No,” she said slowly. “It’s something else.”
“Do you know what it is?”
Caitlin thought she did. “It’s as if he is being threatened and doesn’t know how to react.”

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562888

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763203

Redemption

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

…most were ordinary-looking housewives of the gossip circle,
and of course, a few were the ones usually found in the aristocratic
bars and lounges, ladies with housemaids and black chauffeurs, with
small bedroom dogs and a gigolo on the side. Hermes always looked
down on the so-called upper class; a degrading and pathetic life, he
thought they were like snakes. Those people had all the money they
needed, with their luxurious cars and drug addictions or similar
kinds of crap, and they blindly followed whatever is “modern,” a certain
mania to do as the foreigners did, just to be part of the trend.
According to Hermes, this way of living did nothing to
improve a person’s life. He didn’t belong to the idealists and skeptics,
either, who ignored reality and lived in the clouds of their isolation
with the hope that the world would change on its own volition on
some fine morning and everything would just be splendid. What he
wanted was a major change in society, a change that would make the
commoners’ lives better and the upper class more decent and more
confident people.
What else he wanted to help achieve was to unhook the populace
from the iron fist of the church that had grasped the people’s
lives and orchestrated their comings and goings according to the
dogma of an eastern religion that forbids them from letting go and
adopting a freer mindset, Hermes believed was the inherited treasure
of the Hellenes.
That was the psycho-spiritual hold the church had over the lives
of people, which exerted such power that no one ever had stood opposite
to, from the days of their liberation from the Turks, beginning
of the 19th century. However, how that could be possible and which
method could be applied to get the desired outcome was unknown to
Hermes. Yet he hoped that that would appear to him at some time in
the future. A smile came to his face as if he had already been affected
by such a change.
He walked as he disembarked the ship. His uncle, Demetre,
was among the others on the dock, lordly as always, waving his hand.
Hermes beamed a big smile and walked to him.

https://draft2digital.com/book/4172538#print

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763858

Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

“Do you like it there?”
“No. It’s not where my heart wants to be but it is where I have to be.”
“I was in Toronto once. I married Hilu’s father and he was from Ottawa,
so I’ve been to Ottawa too.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know how you people can live in a place like that. It’s soulless.
It’s like people living in caves up in the air. It’s just not human. How is it
that someone who isn’t born here, who doesn’t live here, and only spent a
few years here, can love this place and these people so much?”
“I don’t know,” Ken said. “I don’t know how that happened. We can
have a lot of ideas and we can say a lot of things, but the reality is that we
don’t know these things. We don’t know the first thing about love – we
haven’t a clue. We have all sorts of feelings and all sorts of passions. We
call it love and hate, but that’s just a lazy way of expressing something
we know nothing about. I think love is something that is lived. It doesn’t
have very much to do with the other person although we focus the idea
on one person. I think it’s a life lived in a particular way. It encompasses
all the things that are in that life and it depends on how that life is lived,
whether the invitation to love will be heard and accepted. I don’t think
there is any language, including Inuktitut, that truly expresses what that’s
all about. The only conclusion I can come to is the one I’ve given you.”
Joan let a long silence hang between them. Ken finally asked her again,
how she knew this was the place where he had witnessed so much death.
“It’s not just you knowing,” he said. “There’s something more concrete to
it. This is a specific place where a specific thing happened.”
“I know this is the place because my mother knew these people and
knows their story and she knows about you,” Joan said. “This was the
time of my grandmother, and my grandmother knew you. My grandmother
found you very interesting. They called you the quiet Kabluna
– the mysterious white man who had the capacity of silence. That’s how
I know about you.”
“Would it be possible to visit them in Baker Lake?” Ken asked.
“Yes.”
“Could we visit now?”
“They’re away.”
“Away?”
“Visiting.”
“Family and friends?”
“Yes – very far away.”
“So we can’t go and see them?”
“No.”

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562830

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073573

Arrows

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

I, too, was part of the jungle.
Our lovemaking grew into a world of dreams. Apacuana had the
power to take me to a hitherto unknown God, beyond the Church, into
an expanse of uncharted feelings as miraculous as any star-filled sky.
Her body became a refuge, a place for revival, like an inexhaustible
spring of healing waters. It was a gate past which I discovered a world
where loneliness was banished. I was shocked to discover she was part
of me, as much as Bartolomé was, perhaps more.
When we lay in one another’s arms, I forgot to think before I
spoke. I told her things that would have never have left my lips
before I knew her. It astonished me that we could learn compassion
from our own tenderness. This was not a lesson in a book, or a
lecture from a priest, and it was certainly not everyone’s duty to
learn it, but pleasure was natural to her, and she taught me that my
tongue could talk to her in ways I had never imagined possible.
And it was these conversations of pure touch, with our expanding
vocabulary of caresses, that I yearned for, that I craved, as much as
the need to satisfy my own desire. And so I came to value frankness
as a form of kindness. She loved me for who I was, not for what I
represented. The truth was simple with her.
She began to trust me with her thoughts. She talked to me, and she
told me how she feared for her future, for the future of her people, and
especially for Matyba and Padumay. Apacuana was wise beyond her
years, perhaps wise beyond her sex. Or were all women wiser than
men and men were trained by other men not to see?
That morning, at the base of that tree, as we lay staring at the sky, I
suddenly asked myself what, in God’s name, was I doing with her?
She must have read my mind, for she turned to me. “If my bleeding
stops,” she said, “will you stay?”

Five days of hard drinking had passed since the killings, and I saw
drunken people sleeping in the most unlikely places. I left the hut for
bare necessities only, but Apacuana came to see me several times…

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562848

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073522