Tag: writing

Jazz with Ella

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Excerpt

“Wow!” She applauded wildly when he finished. But he didn’t stop. Ernesto left for a few moments then reappeared quietly with an enormous, half-empty box of chocolates wrapped in brown paper which he offered to her. They were old, mottled with discolouration, probably kept for his infrequent visitors, but she took one and thanked him. He left again hurriedly and this time returned with a saxophone. She settled back to listen again, a Duke Ellington number that she recognized as “C Jam Blues.” Ernesto stepped in for a few riffs on the sax then put the instrument down to take up a chair beside Jennifer and listen to Volodya play. Although he appeared to be studying the keys as he played, she felt him look up every so often, gauging her reaction. Was that simply a performer who loved an audience? Or something deeper, more demanding? She wasn’t sure and felt a slight shiver.
“Are you cold?” Ernesto leaned over to her and offered another chocolate. “Even in summer this room is cool.” Volodya ignored them and continued to play.
“No, thank you. It’s a wonderful room. It was once so elegant, I think.”
“It was the formal dining room for the house when the bourgeoisie lived here. You see how this wall cuts off the rest of the room? When it was whole, the dining room took up 30 square meters of floor space—all for one wealthy family.”
“And was the piano here then, too?” she asked. “It looks old.” Now, she noticed how the black lustre had worn down to a scuff in many places, how the legs were chipped. “You must be the one who keeps it in tune?”
“Yes, I take care of it. It’s also pre-revolutionary.” Here, Ernesto smiled with pride. He might dismiss the ostentatious living quarters of the wealthy, but he obviously cherished their toys. “It’s why I can’t leave the apartment. I won’t leave without it and we can’t fit it through this door.” He laughed out loud and Volodya glanced up and smiled.
“So it sat here all during the revolution and the siege of Leningrad and everything?” she asked. “I’m surprised someone didn’t burn it for firewood during those terrible winters.”
“Someone loved this piano—dearly,” Ernesto replied, then he added sheepishly, “and you know I only let those play who also love the piano. Vlad is a flashy scoundrel, but he loves to play.”

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763246

The Circle

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Excerpt

Now Hakim finds the opportunity to get back to the subject which has been
on his mind for the past two days.
“Please tell me, my uncle, what you know about Jennifer’s dad and the
Admiral? What work, in particular, do they do for the CIA?”
Ibrahim looks at him closely, “It is a long story,my son; however, you deserve
the truth. I promise we’ll discuss that on our trip to New York; leave it alone for
the time being. By the way, let me ask you a question. How do you see your
relationship with young Jennifer? How do you see yourself in the next little while
with her, or is she just a flirt whom you’ll leave behind when you return home?
You know, you may find yourself with a lot more responsibilities than you have
in mind so far.”
Hakim is unprepared for such a discussion, but Ibrahim is right; he has to
make up his mind regarding his relationship with Jennifer, sooner or later. He
asks himself the same question sometimes and doesn’t have the answer. He’s not
sure where he wants their relationship to go, not yet.
“I don’t know, my uncle; I like Jennifer. I like her a lot, but I haven’t thought
of anything beyond the present. She’s just a girl I see these days.”
“You mean she hasn’t touched you in a special way?”
Really, has she touched him in a special way? He wonders. He turns and looks
deep into his uncle’s eyes, and the old man who knows life sees in Hakim’s eyes a
young man in love. He smiles at him and says, “I see that she has touched you in a
lot of different ways, my dear son. That being said, you are a young man, and a
young woman will always be welcomed next to you. Whomever you choose to
have next to you is going to be my favorite one. Remember, always remember
the priority of things and devote the necessary time to each. You will learn as you
go. She also has to know how far she can go with her wants, when you need to put
extra time into the family business. Women are always welcome in the life of a
man, particularly a young man. Our relationships with them are of a certain
kind; each of us has his own way of defining that, and each of us learns from his
own experience with a woman who we are and what we like in life. But always
remember that you give your woman the part of you that belongs to her, and the
rest of you belong to you and nobody else.”
Hakim appreciates his uncle’s comments and doesn’t hesitate to let him know.
“I know, my uncle, I appreciate your advice on everything. Your opinion is
always most important to me. That’ll never change, I promise.”
“Thank you, my dear son.”
Before they part Hakim learns he has to be at the hotel the next morning at
about seven, as their flight is at 10:15 a.m. and they have to be at the airport two
hours earlier.

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

Arrows

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Excerpt

Sweat broke out on my nape and forehead. The woman watched
me closely, giving me the annoying feeling that she could read my
thoughts. Perhaps she was a witch.
When a gourd filled with a milky beverage of uncertain origin
arrived under my nose, I began to miss my countrymen. Tamanoa
held it while the rest awaited my reaction. The children giggled and
I smiled, raising one eyebrow at them. I took the gourd out of
Tamanoa’s grasp, noticing the quizzical expression in his eyes.
“It’s chicha,” he informed me.
I sat down on the ground and crossed my legs, minding the
Seraphic Rosary so that it rested on the cloth of my cassock stretched
between my knees. I raised my eyes to heaven, as much to bless the
chicha as to ask for help. Well, Salvador, if you want the dog, you’ll
have to accept the fleas, I told myself, and took a gulp.
It wasn’t completely unpalatable. Had I known that its
fermentation was aided by the spittle of the women who concocted
it, I might have been less inclined to drink it. I passed it along,
fighting the urge to retch, eyes watering. Mater Dei, please tell me
that gourd never covered anyone’s genitals, I prayed.
The sight of another male with his foreskin neatly strangled with
a cord that went about his hips, his balls—wrinkled and
saggy—hanging like a cockerel’s wattles, made me regurgitate the
devil-sent chicha. I kept swallowing it back until, able to escape
unnoticed, I hid behind a tree and vomited my guts out.

We neared Nueva Segovia de Barquisimeto, a city founded in 1552,
along a murky river the Caquetíos Indians had called Variquesemeto
long before the Spaniards began renaming everything.
Diego de Losada led the way on his magnificent black
Andalusian horse, which seemed to share its master’s dreams of
greatness. All horses except my Babieca were proud, elegant beasts
with thick necks, strong chests and powerful, arched croups. Bred
from the first horses to arrive from La Española,

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

He Rode Tall

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Excerpt

brush not ten feet beside him. In an instant, he realized that,
with the wind blowing away from them, the deer didn’t hear or
smell the horse and rider headed their direction. No sooner had
the deer fled in a scurry of dirt and brush than the buckskin
jumped, nearly out of his skin. One moment Joel was sitting solidly
on the back of the buckskin and the next they were both ten
feet to the right, with Joel experiencing a launch akin to take-off
on a NASA space mission.
With a power that he could hardly imagine possible, the young
horse had rocketed forward, leaving Joel behind. In actual fact, it
would have been better if he did get left behind, but Joel’s left boot
stuck in the stirrup. And with the force of the jump, his boot had
slipped through the stirrup. Now he was being dragged at breakneck
speed across the rock-strewn hillside. His foot was supposed
to slip out of the boot and free him from danger but what
was supposed to happen just didn’t.
Spooked by the deer, the buckskin gelding blasted up and out
of the coulee, racing to the barn. Joel knew that this couldn’t last
for long. There were just too many boulders between there and
the barn, and the odds that he would hit at least one were pretty
good unless he did something in a hurry as he bounced along on
his back, dragged by the horse and only inches from the pounding
hooves. In a flash, Joel imagined his exposed cranium hitting a
granite boulder at twenty-five miles per hour. With one cry he
asked, pleaded, begged, and commanded the horse to stop with a
desperate “Whoa!”
As a boy, his dad had told Joel that anyone could stop a horse,
sooner or later, by pulling back on the reins, but his dad showed
him an unusual technique—dropping the reins to the horse’s
neck and asking it to whoa. Right here, right now, he was glad
that he had worked so hard with the gelding on exactly this
maneuver. But practicing in the round pen and the arena was one
thing; Joel was about to discover how effective his training would
be in the wide-open space of the pasture.

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

Arrows

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Excerpt

The day of our departure came too soon. Entire families gathered
at the plaza to bid farewell to their most respectable sons. After a
year of preparation, don Diego de Losada had managed to convince
one hundred and fifty men to take their chances with him. No small
achievement, considering their prospects for survival.
Our expedition was bound for the province of Caracas—where
the town of San Francisco had briefly existed—and we were
destined to rebuild it in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ for our
most gracious king, His Sanctified Catholic Majesty, Don Felipe II.
Less than five men out of each of the previous two expeditions into
the area had been left alive to tell the tale.
I had heard stories about battles, about how I would be lucky to
be killed at once. Cannibals liked to tie a Christian to a tree while
they danced in circles, possessed by the devil, chopping pieces out of
him every time they came about, cooking his parts under his nose or
even eating them raw, shooting arrows at him until his blood had
drained, blood they would collect in little bowls and drink as they
danced, smearing it on their bodies, spitting it on the ground.
One chief in particular, Guacaipuro, who commanded the Indian
forces of the valley of Caracas, put the fear of God into Spanish and
tame Indians alike, for it was said he had no mercy for either. All of
the other chiefs pledged their allegiance to him. On the land of one of
these, the settlement of San Francisco had been established almost a
decade ago, but Guacaipuro had burned it to ashes. It was to that
place we were heading.
Dressed in their feathered morions, coats of mail and cloaks,
twenty men on horseback under don Francisco Ponce’s command
melted stoically like butter in the sun, to be accompanied by fifty
harquebusiers with their pouches heavy with stone munitions,
eighty men on foot, eight hundred servants, two hundred beasts of
burden, several thousand pigs, four thousand sheep—all intended
to secure the beginnings of a new city.

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

Jazz with Ella

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Excerpt

Just as they had spent that first evening on the street, Jennifer and Volodya spent the next afternoon mostly on the street, in the peculiar privacy that Soviets find in large crowds. She bought him cognac and cigarettes at Beryozka the foreign currency souvenir store. He bought her Russian language books, stories of the city, and corrected her sentences. She showed him her contact lenses and how they worked. He marvelled. Such things were unheard of in the Soviet Union, he told her, but he had seen some Japanese tourists use them. That night Jennifer returned to the hotel, Volodya to his home.
The next day as they were passing the Hotel Europe, another accommodation reserved solely for visitors from the west, he grabbed her hand, glanced around to see if they were being followed and walked into the lobby, saying in English, “I want to show you something. Go along with me to the restaurant.” They strolled to the elegant restaurant portal and waited in the foyer. There was no one in sight.
“Hey, if you’re pretending to be an American, you’re holding your cigarette all wrong,” she whispered. “Don’t curl it under your hand. Just let it sit between your fingers. Like so.” She surreptitiously straightened his fingers, rearranging the cigarette. He grinned at her. She felt the warmth of the smile and let her hand linger on his.
“Thank you,” he said in English. “Now look over at that table under the light. I will not point. You see?” Jennifer peered. “See the centre arrangement? That is a microphone—how they listen. Only the ones with that arrangement—and some of the others there, that table and that one.”
Jennifer stared but couldn’t see the difference in the various tables.
“How do you know?”

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763246

Still Waters

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Excerpt

with pleasant features which, at this moment, looked grim. But he
smiled reassuringly when he saw the fear on the faces of Carol Ann’s
parents. He nodded to Tyne, then turned to them.
“Mr. & Mrs. Shaughnessy, I’m Dr. Kendall. Your daughter will be
fine. She’s in the recovery room, but you can see her as soon as she
comes to the ward.”
Mr. Shaughnessy, who had risen to his feet, took a deep breath. His
voice was hoarse. “Thank you, Doctor. That’s such a relief.” He hesitated,
glanced at his wife, then turned again to Dr. Kendall. “Do you
know what caused so much bleeding? Is it likely to happen again?”
Dr. Kendall’s eyes opened wide, and for a moment he stood immobilized.
Tyne held her breath. Then, appearing to regain his composure,
he stepped further into the room. “I’m sorry. I see you were
not aware that Carol Ann was pregnant.”
“Oh, my God.” Mrs. Shaughnessy’s hands flew to her face.
Mr. Shaughnessy stood rigid, his face drained of colour. “What are
you saying?” His eyes, two deep pools of anger and shock, did not
leave the face of the man in front of him. “What are you saying?” he
repeated, his voice rising.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mr. Shaughnessy,” Dr. Kendall’s
face registered genuine regret, “but I’m afraid Carol Ann went to
someone to have the pregnancy terminated. Whoever it was did only
half the job. She could have died.”
Mr. Shaughnessy sat down heavily and buried his face in his
hands. His wife broke into uncontrollable sobs as Tyne held her, her
own heart breaking. 
Carol Ann came to the ward from the recovery room at eleven
o’clock. Tyne remained in the waiting room while Mr. & Mrs.
Shaughnessy went in to see their daughter. She thought they might
wish to speak with her before they left. But when they came out
of the room, grim-faced, they passed the open door of the waiting
room without a glance in Tyne’s direction.
Feeling light-headed from lack of sleep and food, she made her
way to the nurses’ station to speak to Sister Mary Louise. “May I see
Miss Shaughnessy now, Sister?”

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763068

Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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Excerpt

distance away observing him. When they saw that he had noticed them,
they came to sit beside him. The man said, “My mother says you are a
very quiet Kabluna.”
“Maybe all Kablunat are quiet,” he said.
The man translated for his mother and said, “She says that all other
Kablunat that she has known are noisy. They talk a lot.”
“Maybe I don’t have much to say,” he replied. “Maybe I don’t know
very much.”
When Ken questioned the old woman about the Inuksuit she told him
a story that began a long, long time ago when there were very few human
beings. They travelled over the vast land in small family groups, following
the herds of caribou that were the source of their food, their tents,
their clothing, and their utensils. They could not afford to deplete their
energy by chasing the food. Instead, they made stone human beings and
called them Inukshuk, which means, like a person or acting in the place
of a person.
The people placed the Inuksuit in V-shaped formations. The caribou
with their poor eyesight, thought the Inuksuit were hunters and so it required
only a very few people to herd them into a trap. The closer they
came to the end of the V, the closer together the Inuksuit were placed.
At the point of the V, hunters hid behind boulders while women
and children lay on the ground beside the Inuksuit. As the caribou approached,
the women and children jumped up, waved their arms, and
danced about, to give the appearance of many, many hunters. The caribou
would then stampede to the end of the V, which was usually at the
junction of a lake and a river. When the caribou plunged into the lake,
the hunters hidden behind the boulders would jump into their kayaks
and paddle after them, spearing them in the water. Then they would haul
them back to shore where the entire family, even the children, would
clean and gut the animals.
Inuksuit also took on many other shapes, the old woman said. The one
on the river’s edge where they were sitting was a fishing Inukshuk. She
knew this because it was topped with a smooth stone taken from the riverbed.
It indicted that the fishing was good here. Other shapes had other
meanings and the configurations of Inuksuit had meaning also.
To my mind, what I was hearing sounded like language but they didn’t
write the language on a piece of paper – they wrote it directly on the land.
And I was beginning to get the picture of absolute practicality. Here you
could live with minimum technology if you knew how. To think that you
could direct an entire way of life by putting a few stones together just so,
so that other people coming would be able to read the significance of these
things. The degree of sophistication of this began to seep into me and I realized
there was much to learn here. And this way of life was like the people

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

Swamped

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Excerpt

“Yeah.” Frankie smiled. “Movies. Look it up. It’s going places.”
“I shall.”
“Have a good day, Eteo,” Frankie said as his phone rang again
and he walked off to answer it.
Eteo had met Frankie when they both worked for Yorkshire Securities,
one of the solidest firms in Vancouver. He had known Henry,
Frankie’s brother, first, and through Henry he had met Frankie, who
had risen from a junior broker there to being one of the big wheels
in downtown Vancouver.
Frankie had important contacts all over, which meant he could
raise huge amounts of money for any deal he thought was good. Eteo
knew nothing about the film industry, but if Frankie said Lionsgate
Entertainment was going places, Eteo knew he should look into it.
He walked toward the 22nd Street dock. The water was beautiful
again, with small swells washing over the rocks on the shore and
making the sea weed and barnacles that covered them shimmer.
Countless sea gulls circled and swooped above calling out strange
messages that only gulls understood. Their screeching voices always
struck Eteo as almost out of this world. ey seemed to inhabit a
world of wonders and exaggerations. Did Frankie, who had le the
resource sector to get involved in the film industry, inhabit another
world of wonders now?
Eteo knew that a lot of brokers followed Frankie wherever he led.
They all wanted a piece of whatever action Frankie had. At one time
there had even been rumors that Frankie controlled Yorkshire Securities.
He had certainly seemed to have the biggest say in everything
the firm got into. Then the rumors were that he had left the firm to
develop something totally his, a company from scratch. Could this
Lionsgate Entertainment be the one? Eteo always admired people who
started from the bottom and became leaders in their field. Frankie
was such a man, and Eteo promised himself to look into Lionsgate as
soon as he could.
His eyes were drawn to a runabout coming under the Lions Gate
Bridge and speeding toward the outer area of English Bay. Runabouts
were used as water taxies to ferry harbour pilots, who by law were
assigned to command the vessels in and out of the harbour.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08WP3LMPX

Water in the Wilderness

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Excerpt

Thank goodness for that.” She took a sip of coffee then put her cup down and sighed. “Working for Dr. Merkel has been good for him. He came home two days ago more animated than we’ve seen him since Barry died. He’d help deliver a calf that was coming backwards, he said.”
Tyne smiled. “We could have used him on the farm the other day.” And she related the details of Jezebel’s ordeal to her mother, not neglecting to mention her part in it, and how Morley had gotten after her for foolishly entering the pen.
“Well, I guess you deserved it. I’m glad someone is looking out for my headstrong daughter.”
Tyne wrinkled her nose, and they both laughed, but Tyne quickly sobered.
“How is Jeremy then? Do you think he’s getting better?”
Emily looked beyond Tyne to the living room, and took a deep breath. “I think so; that is, I hope so. The trouble is, your dad doesn’t have much patience with him. He thinks Jeremy should just snap out of it.”
Tyne toyed with the muffin on her plate. Oh yes, that was so like Jeffery Milligan – just buck up and get over it. But she wondered if it was simply her dad’s reluctance to show any weakness on his part – stiff upper lip, and all that. Lately, she had been inclined to allow him the benefit of the doubt.
She looked up. “Morley would like Jeremy to help him with the harvesting this weekend. Do you think he will?”
“Oh my yes, I think so. At least, he certainly enjoyed it last year, and it will give him a lift. Tell Morley thanks for thinking of him, dear.”
“I will. And Mom, I want you to know that Morley and I have been praying for Jeremy.”
Emily smiled and squeezed Tyne’s hand where it lay on the table. “Thank you, Tyne. I knew you would be.”

https://www.amazon.com/dp/192676319X