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Short Stories [click on the title to read an excerpt] Blue Glass Pebbles (July/August 2006 issue of Interzone (#205), July/August 2006) Shit Magnet Brecken, a paramedic in the Kootenays, likes doing trauma calls, likes them coming fast and furious. "Give me an old-fashioned car wreck any day," he tells Ritchie, the new guy. But his partner on car, Jas, and his brother, Dan, a Vietnam Vet, know that Brecken's full of shit, even if he doesn't know it himself. (Event, #33.3, April 2005) The Postmodern Man Josh, husband and father of two, is haunted by the ordinariness of his life. He craves change yet doesn't know what he really wants, just something bolder, rawer... something ...apocalyptic. (subTerrain, #39, [Volume 4 no. 39] Spring 2004) Chasing Goodbye [Click on the title to read the full story!] Taped to a chair, with tape over her eyes and her mouth, Ria Hunter's struggle for consciousness was rewarded by the memory of her daughter hanging limp in her ex's arms. Mars was big planet when you're looking for a five-year old girl. And the universe was so much bigger.... (On Spec, Summer 2003) Skin to Skin [Click on the title to read the full story!] She spun into his world like the Tasmanian Devil and only his fear kept him from letting go, his fear and that thing he thought he saw moving behind her eyes... ( The Fed Anthology, edited by Susan Musgrave, published by Anvil Press) No Life Like It [Click on the title to read the full story!] Ira Garrett, self-proclaimed 911-junkie, left behind his dead-end street paramedic job in Seattle for a bigger thrill as a military medic. When he ended up training with the virtual combat unit, he figured there was no life like it. Until the souvenirs CandyAss was collecting stopped vanishing at the end of the sims.... (On Spec, Spring 2003) Leavings (The Windsor ReView, Vol. 35, #2, Fall 2002) That Was the Night He Got Lost He thought he'd just go outside into the backyard of the farm on Buckhorn Road and make a snowman while his parents played cards with their friends, but the quiet of the night drew him among the trees.... (TickleAce, Issue #39, Spring 2001) Windows Rolled All the Way Down (The New Quarterly, Spring 2000) G is for Gargoyle Lee was convinced that Garth, the concrete gargoyle Julia bought him as a garden-warming present, actually kept the deer out of his garden. And he could see that Julia was beginning to worry that he might be losing some of his marbles.... (On Spec, Fall 1999) Jubilee [Click on the title to read the full story!] There's one in every congregation, and in Reverend Dave's that one was Mrs. Miller. He figured the slime lamb that rose out of the sanctuary floor and attacked her right there in the pew was just another of those tabloid-style dreams he had about her. But he wasn't dreaming.... (On Spec, Summer 1999; SFCanada Online Fiction, Winter 2004; Dreams & Visions #33, Summer 2004)House of Feasting [Click on the title to read the full story!] Janna's bone cancer was eating her alive. And the moment Evan both dreaded and guiltily yearned for was upon him, the moment between one breath and.... (The New Quarterly, Spring 1999) Chasing the Dragon on the Sea of Tranquility My very first publication! A Calgary paramedic working on the moon begins to realize he may have bitten off more than he can chew.... (On Spec, Summer 1998)
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Blue Glass Pebbles My novella, "Blue Glass Pebbles," is in the July/August 2006 issue of Interzone (#205), an SF magazine published in the United Kingdom. Pamelina H. did the fabulous artwork for the story. |  |
Shit Magnet (Event, #33.3, April 2005)
Some
of the guys at the station think trauma's boring.
Medical calls, they say, that's where the fun is:
chest-pain and short-of-breath calls, doing the detective work of
charting the signs and symptoms, mentally sketching out the pathophysiology, and
giving drugs. And besides, they
hate the grunt work, crawling around in the mud and the blood and the beer, as
Johnny Cash would say. Hate to get
their pants dirty. Give me an
old-fashioned car wreck any day. Music
to my ears. It's like war, only nobody's shooting at you while you're
doing your job: bullets, shrapnel,
mortars; high-speed collisions, steering-wheel impacts, flesh meets torn metal.
#
"Don't
listen to him," Jas says above the wail of the ambulance siren as she pulls
out to pass a line of cars. "He's so full of shit, his eyes are
brown."
The
sun is bright and hard, pavement dry, given that it's June.
It's just after oh-eight-hundred. The
latest newbie, Ritchie somebody-or-other, laughs a nervous little laugh.
He's doing his five attending calls with me and Jas looking over his
shoulder. Five supervised calls,
that's it, and then they let the poor son-of-a-bitch loose on the public.
We're going out to a head-on, supposedly logging-truck-versus-car, but, truth be told, you never really know 'til you get there. That's what I tell Ritchie, who is in the jump seat in the back, leaning forward through the gap in the bulkhead. "So don't get your hopes up," I say and laugh, even though I know he's scared.
The Postmodern Man (subTerrain, #39 [Volume 4, no. 39] 2004)
I
back the Toyota Sienna out into the cul-de-sac, the Teletubbies’ song
anesthetizing my cerebellum, cold November rain pissing ordinariness all over
the pavement. Abby wants to sing
“Jesus Loves Me,” so we do, and Isaac starts to cry, face all blotched red. Abby and I sing louder, trying to drown him out.
Emma was out the door at six a.m. for a breakfast meeting, so I’m
dropping the kids off at the babysitter’s.
We swing out of the Ayr suburbs onto Northumberland Road, heading north into Kitchener. I rattle through the CDs looking for The Wiggles, which I’ve bargained to escape another round of “Jesus Loves Me.” Isaac is still crying.
I almost drive through a stop sign.
I can’t seem to concentrate. We talked until one in the morning, Emma jagged as if on caffeine, bouncing on the bed, her silk aubergine nightie flouncing up over her freckled thighs, her eyes crisp and laughing. She’s been offered a job in New York, writing software for one of the big brokerage firms, and she wants it, badly. They came looking for her, and hell, she alone can make more money than the two of us together make now. We can live in New Jersey, and she can commute. And, of course, she added, grinning and grinning, you can always dig up a decent-paying tech job just about anywhere.
It’s true, I can be bored out of my mind just about anywhere. I’m the proverbial frog sitting in the pot of water, slowly being boiled alive because it adjusts and adapts to each rise in temperature without perceiving the ultimate, and immanent, danger.That Was the Night He Got Lost (TickleAce, Issue #39, Spring 2001)
He
had been trying to follow his bootprints back home like he had seen on TV, but
got them mixed up, and he was wandering through the forest of lodgepole pine and
Engelman spruce that all looked the same.
The night was close, the clouds so low he could have grabbed them with his handknitted mittens, which were too big and sloppy for his small hands—he was only five. He didn’t usually get to go outside at night but tonight his parents wanted to play cards and drink with their friends.
He crawled over white-blanketed logs, slogged through the knee-deep snow, retraced yet another set of bootprints.
Then he found himself back at the same log and so he sat down to wait. If you are lost, wait for help to come. He called out, startling the snowflakes, making them fall harder with his growing fear. He sat with his back to the log, snowsuited knees tucked up, wondering how long it would be before they came looking for him.
And he thought about them. They would be sitting at the kitchen table, not the one for company in the dining room, but the white-topped one in the grand white kitchen, with the blue geese with bright bows wallpapered in a strip near the ceiling, and the woodbrown cupboards with their pale blue plastic handles. They would be smoking a lot of cigarettes, and laughing very loudly, and swearing. “Holy shit, look at that! A goddamn red canasta. Read ’em and weep, ladies.”
He could read the names written on the bottles and cans. Vodka. Rum. Molson. Ice Beer. And he didn’t even go to school yet.
G is for Gargoyle (On Spec, Fall 1999)
The moment I saw Garth I was smitten.
Julia bought him for me right then and there.
“It’s three hundred bucks,” I said, protesting, but sounding much too gosh-darn-what-a-deal-for-me.
“A garden-warming present,” she said, sliding her MasterCard across the counter at Carlotta’s, “since it doesn’t look like you’ll ever get the house finished enough for a housewarming gift.”
I grinned. I had been fending off gifts of ceramic garden gnomes and earthy goddesses ever since I began building the garden.
Garth is molded concrete, dyed a flat dirty green, and weighs about sixty-five pounds. I lugged him out to the truck myself, and held him on my lap all the way home. Like a kid with a new puppy. I admired his round scales, and the neat way his wings tucked tightly into his back, making them almost invisible.
I put Garth out in the sitting garden at the side of the house, on the centre rise that overlooks the koi pond. Prominent, but a little hidden by the geraniums, so visitors would have to steal a second look to confirm that they hadn’t simply imagined seeing something peculiar.
The next morning, as I puttered around the garden, watering and picking off dead blooms, and Julia drank her morning coffee at the wrought iron garden table, I talked to Garth, tickled him under his beaked chin, stroked his upright ears.
“Jesus, Lee,” Julia said, looking up from the murder mystery she was reading, “you don’t pay that much attention to the cat.”
“It’s important to treat gargoyles with extra kindness,” I said. “They’re very sensitive creatures.”
"And cats aren't?"
“Of course they are. You see, gargoyles and cats actually evolved from the same ancestor. With gargoyles, some serious mutating took place early on.” Julia was ignoring me now, so I continued. “But in their hearts, gargoyles and cats aren’t all that different. Gargoyles are known to be more loyal than cats, though, and more protective. Which makes them prime companions. Perfect familiars.”
Julia refilled her mug from the white carafe and returned to her murder mystery.
“And besides,” I added. “It’s common knowledge that gargoyles are the best thing for keeping deer out of your garden.”
“In your twisted world, maybe,” Julia said.
“You like my twisted world. You said so yourself.”
“I lied.” She stuck her tongue out at me.
Chasing the Dragon on the Sea of Tranquility (On Spec, Summer 1998)
I
got kinda drunk last Saturday night.
Okay, very drunk.
I never drink when I’m on standby. Never.
Never before anyway.
My wife and I had just split up the night before and I was feeling like crap. She wanted my stuff out of the flat in forty-eight hours or she’d huck it all into the airlock and I could goddamn well pick it up off two hectares of moonscape.
So I got myself good and pissed. Started shooting tequila at BJ’s with some of the crew who’d been out at the substation when I was there. Roger and Donna and Kwan and that Quebecois hard-ass, what’s his name? Guy. Told war stories and drank ’til I couldn’t stand up.
Jesus. Hard to believe I’ve been here four years now.
The scenery's the shits, but the pay is great, and quite frankly, the rush is even better.