A Column of The Miramichi Reader
On a still fall day, I walk through the woods near the river. My knee is behaving and I work up a sweat under my Mackinaw. I come across an old campsite. A rusted stove—white enamel peeling. Tin cans in a pile. There is a blackened jackknife folded and set with care on a cushion …
Emily arrived at the house as the sun rolled above the roofline, painting the drab weatherboards lemon, turning the last leaves of the Glory Tree gold. That was her name for the kowhai her father planted when she was born. In later years she used to lie beneath its branches pretending she was a princess …
The old man’s eyes lit up as the young man entered the living room. “Lovely to see you again,” the old man said. “Weren’t you here just the other day?” “Yes,” the young man said, his chest tightening. The old man’s head of white hair was combed and flattened, not a wisp out of place. …
Although the sun shone the day they took me to the hospital to have my wings removed, there were rumblings of a large storm brewing in the west. The doctor hmm-ed and ahh-ed and pursed his lips. Stepping back, he unfurled my left wing with clinical roughness, his fingers tracing each ligament with an unsettling …
Ma often said that despite everything, we were lucky people, because the Bug Man came over to our house for free, sprayed in places nobody had ever seen. Places that we never knew were there. Happy times were when the Bug Man pulled up, in his strange truck with a giant plastic model spider glued …
How often had she imagined a safe place where she might go and live alone, an old abandoned cabin, small and sturdy, built high on some isolated mountaintop. A meadow of alpine flowers would grow right up to her door, and the cheerful presence of birds and mice and butterflies would enliven the stark dramatic …
The shelf in the riverbed was behind them and so was the roar of the rough white water. The river was now almost motionless. It was glassy and gliding and calm. Paul watched a current as it slid round a boulder and marked the river’s brim with a spinning silver stream. He saw the mirrored …
In the walled garden of a Cova da Beira hillside villa, four-year-old Sofia Mariana’s avô napped, shaded by the branches of a cherry tree. Sweet, juicy fruit weighted the tree’s branches. Sofia Mariana, wishing to reach eat the cherries, climbed upon avô’s chaise longue. The weekday care for the child fell to the old man, …
At the harbour, where island boys gather to trade cigarettes and obscenities, where trawler-men unload, the slow ferry docks and I come home. I climb the lane past stubborn cottages shouldered against the sea, to her house, my house now. The door moans and the fire, long dead, is slow to answer. That first night, …
As our little boat puttered towards the iceberg he said, “It’s like it’s been carved.” “A little bigger than any human carving,” I said. I tried to sound bored, as if I had seen it out fishing every day. “By giants, then. Or aliens, or something. But you know what I mean. Look at the …
It’s surprising how much light the moon and the snow make between them when you need the outhouse in the blackness of a Nova Scotia winter and it’s good, because the cold beauty distracts you from the fact that you have to sit on the cold plastic seat attached too tight with screws splitting the wood so …
Say that you’re kissing a strange girl. Yes, things like that do happen. Say that you’d gone to a bar, you’d drunk even more than usual, say that you hadn’t gone along with your colleagues this time, remembering your wife sneering as you picked up your briefcase: “Do all these meetings have to end up …