CLEARANCES by Ulrich Wendt

The Highland clearances, the expulsion of the Acadians,
Shaka Zulu and the myth of empty Africa, all these things
have made me think again about the ridiculous story of original sin.
For who now lives but on dust and bones of lands long cleared of others?

Well now, Samuel, you cute little zygote,
I can hardly wait to show you around the dusty old place
being, for the moment, happily self-deluded that I am showing you
an unmarked country, trying to imagine how it will feel to be you blinking, dumbfounded, thunderstruck at everything that is absolutely
brightly shiny untouched and new.

No need for you the need to forget the rousting out
of those inconvenient folks who – having come before us –
built their dykes and farms where we wanted to be, planted their orchards
of which a single apple-tree now old, bedraggled,
blooming only every second year and even then bereft of fruit,
beside a hut long razed, remains.

For from the first day after the slamming shut of the gates of Eden,
this is what all of us have been hungry for – to walk amazed among new flowers
on empty land that is ours for the taking. You, having freshly popped out,
won’t have to work too hard imagining with the First People
the heart-thumping feel of cresting a hill in Alaska or the Dardanelles, say,
and spread before you the new valley – oh my god!- all full of the most fantastical
honey-coloured fields of grass and herds and herds of dinner on the hoof.
Paradise again, perhaps, through the back door.

Watch This Space

Coming soon, an excerpt from The Grand Silence by James (Jim) Robert Farrell, a mystery, featuring sleuth Thomas Patrick O'Neale, aka The Confessor, a civilian recruited by the police force for help with cases which can only be solved by a confession.

THE SHINY RED SCOOTER

Creative non-fiction by Joy Asham

Clear the streets! Hide your children! I just got a shiny red scooter. This is good news for me, but for you it might mean disaster. Actually it has meant a bit of that to me, too. I never realized I was a bad driver until …

Let’s start at the beginning. Almost three years ago now my touchy back problems became acute and I suffered for a long time with three disintegrated discs. Once the pain finally lessened a year later, I was left with extreme weakness and have forever lost much of the flexibility required to walk and operate normally.

On good days I use a cane to walk, on worse days a walker and then, sometimes, I just have to stay put as my bad back has undermined many areas of my overall health. I cannot leave my building without getting a ride or taking a cab so I have lost my independence. This has been a severe blow. Giving up working was very hard: I am, well, a busybody. And, I like to snoop.

I don’t snoop in the usual way. I don’t observe my neighbours with binoculars, I don’t tag their comings and goings and speculate on their lives. I even try not to make judgments or listen to or pass on gossip. I have been known to do this once or twice, especially if it’s a juicy tidbit, though. My snooping is generally restricted to community matters and whether things are working the way they should or not. In terms of personal lives I try to mind my own business while I live in a world that seems overly interested in mine.

Oh yes, that is a bit of a digression but I do live in a building that at one time was for seniors but is now blended – people with disabilities, Elders, seniors (yes, there is a difference). What was once almost mono-cultural is now becoming more reflective of Thunder Bay’s true population demographics as Aboriginal people, immigrants and minority groups infiltrate social housing.

I have used the word “infiltrate” because at times that is the attitude that we are presented with. We are not wanted, persona non grata. We are tagged as “the locals” and nice little blue-haired old ladies guard the gateway, or at least, the common room. I differentiated in the previous paragraph between a senior and an Elder. I was taught from the time I was born to respect my elders and have always done so. But I have grown to define Elder as someone who requires my respect because they are older than me, but have earned it by the growth you can see in their spirit, regardless of what hard times they have been through.

I guess I believe that anyone can live to be old if they don’t have challenges, but it is how one deals with a rough life that tells their true internal qualities. Here where I live I have seen people with relatively smooth lives become bitter at not having more, turning to gambling and gossiping and internal political control. And then there are the Elders, regardless of race or background, they have learned to overcome problems with the Spirit and have grown and gained Grace because of it. These are the ones I truly respect, enjoy, spend time with and support, whenever I get the chance. I also look for this kind of relationship outside my building - I am a busybody as I said.
So, I volunteer out in the community whenever I can. I join committees, visit the sick, do weird political things, I even used to sing in the seniors’ choir (they fired me as I lost my songbook, so I don’t do that anymore) – generally getting in trouble and carrying a cloud of Pigpen dust with me wherever I go.

This all stopped when my back misfired. I had to stay home. At times I could only lay on the bed and count the speckles on the ceiling. Once a month I would drag myself around in cabs to get groceries and do the necessities. I spent a lot of time with a lot of different health professionals and I can stand and walk across the room.

I just got this scooter. It was supposed to be here late in the summer, but, like everything else in my life it took three times longer than it was supposed to. So when I fell in October they put a “rush” on it and it finally got here a week before Christmas. “Ahah!” I said, “now I put the racing stripes on it and I can start busybodying all over the city. Just drive it on the bus and there you go.”

Well, the elevator is the first place I got it trapped, then on the Mainline. A Memorial bus driver or two got truly ticked off when I got it on but couldn’t get it off their buses. I got ticked off when it turned over in the bus with me on it. The other passengers weren’t pleased either when they missed their late night transfer because of me. I have made a few small re-designs in the otherwise pristine paint and have gotten it stuck in a snowbank near the Hakim’s mini-mall. A man about 95 years old stopped his car and dragged me out, not able to pass by “a lady in distress”. Thank you, sir.

I figure by Spring I am going to be an expert. I will be able to turn the thing on a dime. Then I will definitely be back in the busybody business. Meanwhile I have been told by the last bus driver: “Go down to our garage by Hagi – don’t use another bus. At the garage they will let you practice getting off and on in your scooter till you can get it right.”

I’m not quite sure why I feel so offended by this. Certainly I have heard much worse about myself. Right here at home.

Joy Aham is a Cree storymaker and storyteller as well as community activist

The Green Fields of Michigan: A Short Story

The Green Fields of Michigan
Part 1
By Laura E. Atkinson

Things went badly right from the beginning of the trip. First of all, we had to hitchhike just in front of the bridge approach. Anybody who picked us up would expect us to pay part of the toll or something else in payment. We’d also have only a few minutes to get our story straight before hitting the border. The trick was always to get a ride with someone we knew who was going across the river anyway. Nancy had set it up with some guy but it fell through somehow. So there we were, standing in front of the US border signs. When the beat-up, blue car stopped for us, Nancy didn’t do anything at first but swear under her breath.

“What’s wrong,” I hissed at her. I’d already turned to run along the gravel shoulder to the stopped Chevy.

“Oh, it’s that fucker—Billy Francis. I told him I never wanted to see him again.” Nancy just stood there frowning at her feet as I tugged half-heartedly on the sleeve of her pink tee-shirt.

So I gave up. “Okay, let’s wait then. We’ll get another ride.” But I didn’t believe it. We might never get another ride and the longer we stood there the more likely we’d be spotted by someone. It was hard to get away with anything in our little border town.

“Nah, we can’t wait here forever. We’ll just have to lose him once we get across the bridge.” She turned with a shrug and sauntered towards the car.

“Well look who’s turned up. Just like the bad penny.” He was not much older than us but he had a knowing look on his sharp-featured face. Now I remembered Billy. We’d met him and his friend Joey, at Harmony Beach on one of our trips up there earlier in the summer. Nancy had spent time with him while I went to the secluded end of the main beach with his shy friend.

“You didn’t have to stop if you didn’t want to.” Nancy pushed her dark hair back and wiggled her thin shoulders as she settled herself in the middle of the front seat. She hadn’t liked him much last summer and she wasn’t going to change now.

“Oh, you know me,” he said, smirking at her and wagging his head from side to side, “always a sucker for a pretty face.”

Billy wasn’t that easy to lose. He knew exactly what we wanted, a cover story to get through the U.S. border point and a ride to downtown Sault Michigan where someone who could pass for eighteen would get us a mickey of lemon gin or a six-pack of Colt 45. So as soon as we got into his car, it pretty much followed that we’d end up drinking with him later in the old cemetery beside the golf course on the outskirts of town. We owed him by then and he didn’t seem to have anything else to do.

We got out of the car on the gravel road at the edge of the graveyard and ducked under the bottom of the page wire fence where it had been yanked up to create an easy access. As we struck off towards the river bank, Nancy muttered quickly, “Don’t leave me alone with him.” So even though he wandered off between the gravestones and she followed him with a dark look, I stayed right behind her.

“What’s wrong with her?” he said jerking his chin towards me. “Is she attached? Don’t you two do anything by yourselves any more?” Neither of us said anything. “It wasn’t like that last summer, was it?” He began to sing in a low voice, “The spider and the fly went out on the town. The spider had fun and the fly got . . .” He broke off and looking at both of us and speaking in a high stage voice asked, “What did the fly get, Billy? What did that cute little fly get, anyway?”

We settled on some flat rocks under the straggly willows on the muddy bank of the brown stream. Nancy fished a bottle opener out of her shoulder bag and went to work on three of the beer bottles. As soon as he had it in his hand he held the amber bottle up in a mock salute.

“Here’s to drinking with friends,” he offered. “We are friends, aren’t we?” He pretended to be plaintive. “You are my friends, I hope. A guy’s got to have friends, you know.” He lay back in the grass as if completely relaxed and took a swig of the bottle. I looked at his narrow body in the grass and imagined what it would feel like to be close to him in an intimate embrace. Thinking about it didn’t do anything for me. For me it was always more important what I felt coming towards me from the guy, the quality of the attention that they gave me. I quickly lowered my gaze as his eyes swung over to rest on me but all the time he was talking I knew that, even though he looked at me and pretended to talk to me, it was all meant for Nancy.

“I could tell you a thing or two if I wanted to,” he said cocking his head at me with an exaggerated look of concern. “You, little girl, seem to be in need of education. Nancy here doesn’t need any. She doesn’t have any trouble resisting a guy. But I have the feeling that you need a bit of help. You just don’t get that it’s a game, do you? You think it’s serious, don’t you? Nancy doesn’t take the time to tell you anything, so I guess I’ll have to.

“Now, first of all, I have to tell you that you never want to be nice to a guy. No, no, no. You’re supposed to be mean. Isn’t that right Nancy?” He rolled to the side and held out his arms as if to appeal to her but she sniffed and lifted her chin, dismissing him with a gesture.

“That’s okay. No, no, that’s fine, Nancy,” he continued on as if she had answered. “I don’t mind. It’s no trouble at all for me to help her out. You obviously don’t give a damn about your little friend here.” He was swinging back and forth, focusing on me and then on Nancy. Neither one of us was returning his look.

“She’s screwed up, you know. Do you know what happened at Harmony? She got my friend Joey, all wrapped up in a package. Poor guy didn’t even know what hit him. She wasn’t playing by the rules!” By then Billy was almost shouting at her. Nancy just grimaced, turned aside in disgust and blew out through her opened lips.

“And Joey. Let me tell you about Joey. He’s just as screwed up as you are. Never listens to me. I tried to talk to him. I gave him all my tricks. Even my best line. You know how I get a girl to fall for me? It works every time. I tell her, ‘Don’t fall for me. I’m no good. I’ll only break your heart.’ There! There you have it. The whole bag of tricks.” He held out his hands to Nancy and raised his eyebrows as if to say, “Well, what do you think?”

Nancy just looked at him and laughed.

“Aw, hell! I give up!” Suddenly he was on his feet and down the bank of the stream to the muddy verge where he stormed around for a while, grabbing handfuls of grass and throwing them into the water. I felt like laughing too but I let Nancy do it for me. I was a bit worried though—not about what he might do—but that he might leave us there and we’d have to get back out to the main highway somehow. I was just thinking about getting out my map while he was occupied with his tantrum, when he turned toward us.

“Okay, where do you two want to go?” He was up the bank and already halfway back to the car, still grumbling and carrying on under his breath, “I can’t hang around here with you two for ever. It’s not doing me any good,” while we scrambled to our feet, grabbed our stuff, and followed.

Nancy was always so cool in situations I didn’t have a clue how to cope with. She just very calmly told him to take us back to town. She didn’t want to tell him that we were on the road this weekend. We might never get rid of him. So finally after a bit more grumbling, he did just drive us back in. The problem was that we didn’t really have a place to go. Being on the road was the only plan we had. We certainly didn’t want to be stuck in Sault Michigan. That town really was a hole, even compared to the Canadian side which was not much to begin with. Finally we got him to drive us to a crummy apartment building that we knew about, down by the old Union Carbide plant.

The place was a sort of convenience address shared by four coast guard guys for when they were on shore leave in the Sault. We liked to come over here to Sault Michigan for two reasons. The first was that the drinking age was eighteen but, even more important, there were lots of service men around. There was the Air Force base at Kincheloe that airmen cycled through for training but there was also the Coast Guard and most of them were in town for the long haul. They’d taken the four year national guard option to avoid the draft. The draft meant only two years of active service but most probably, it would have been in Vietnam.

We had been to some parties at this place. In fact I had been to quite a few parties here while I was hanging around with this guy called Rory. I hadn’t even really liked him but I often seemed to get into these ridiculous quasi-relationships with these horrible guys. Just to give you an idea about Rory, he gave me a picture of himself when I first met him. It showed him looking as if he knew a secret, holding a guitar and leaning up against a little MGB. On the back of the picture he had written a few lines of poetry that he also quoted to explain why he didn’t have the guitar anymore “I gave it to the first naked nude I saw, with no strings attached.” I guess he never dreamed that anyone else had ever heard of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I didn’t hold this imposture against him since I didn’t expect very much from any of these guys. But it wasn’t his car either. There’s worse stuff about him but that’s probably enough.

Nancy was not intending to let me get anywhere near Rory or any of the other guys. We hopped out of Billy’s car and she shadowed me up the walk to the building entrance, one hand under my elbow, giving me instructions, rapid fire, all the way.

“Now, we’re not even going to go into this dump. Billy’s a complete asshole but he is right about one thing. You’ve got to stop giving it away free to all these losers. Remember we’re on the road this weekend. We’re trying to get somewhere. We don’t have time to fool around.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll just wait in the vestibule until Billy’s gone and then get going. The next street down goes right back out to the highway.” But all the time I was wondering to myself, “If we’re not after the guys then what’s this all about? What are we after?”

We hung around for what seemed like forever at the back of the dimly lit apartment foyer with nothing to look at but the ancient cracked varnish on the wainscoting and the double row of shiny metal mailboxes with their scratched off labels and broken padlocks. But Billy, true to form, always the troublemaker, had decided not to leave. After an age spent in that grimy vestibule with Billy still sitting in his car out front, we finally trudged up the three flights of creaking wooden stairs and down the brown twilight corridors to the door of the apartment. I was actually surprised when someone answered, one of the Coast Guard guys who shared the place. His name was Darryl but that’s all I knew about him. We stood there for a bit, pretty much at a loss, until Darryl finally said we might as well come in.

“I swear, we’ll only be here a minute,” Nancy promised and we rushed to the living room windows at the front to look down at the street. Billy’s car was still there but we couldn’t really see if he was still in it.

“We’ll wait here until he goes,” said Nancy. “He can’t sit there all night.” She slumped down onto the bumpy cast iron radiator with her chin in her hand, her eyes fixed on the top of the blue Chevy. I was left to talk to Darryl. I searched my mind for something to say but came up empty.

“Don’t worry. We won’t be staying.” I said lamely. There was another long moment of awkward silence.

“Uh, that’s okay,” he finally mumbled, looking at me with a vaguely startled expression but not as if I was of any great interest to him. He was a cute guy in spite of the way that his short haircut made his ears look naked and I briefly considered making a move. At that moment it seemed a lot easier than making conversation.

Then I remembered that Darryl was the good boy in the bunch. Instead of just screwing around he’d taken up with a local girl named Brenda. I’d never met her but apparently they just sat around all the time with their heads together holding hands. The other guys teased him about spending all that time with her, designing a house in the suburbs or picking out names for their two point five children. The only thing I could ever remember him saying was that Brenda was going to get a bubble cut.

“So,” I said, now truly desperate, “Did Brenda ever get that bubble cut?”

Suddenly there was a rustling noise and a tall girl in neat cords and sweater and a cap of shiny brown hair emerged from the far recesses of the dining nook that was built- in off the hallway. It was Brenda to the rescue and Darryl sure looked relieved.

“Actually, I’m here,” she said. “And I did get the bubble cut. See?” And for an awful moment she shook her head from side to side swinging her glossy, perfectly cut hair back and forth in my face. I wished myself anywhere but there.

“Well, that’s great then,” I blathered, backing away from her down the hall. “It looks good—really good.” My own hair was stringy and my tee shirt rumpled. I was pretty sure there were grass stains on my jeans. I wheeled around and zoomed into the living room.

“C’mon Nancy. We’ve got to go.” I picked up her pack and headed back towards the door.

“He’s still out there,” Nancy cried, flinging her hand dramatically towards the front windows. “He’s never going to leave us alone.”

“There has to be a back entrance to this place.” I said with sudden inspiration. “We can cut across that vacant land over to the main road.”

“Hey. You’re right! Hah! Billy can wait here all night,” Nancy laughed in triumph as we swept past Darryl and his sorority girl. As soon as we had thundered down the stairs, found the back entrance and burst through it, I felt a lot better. I hated having that girl’s cool appraising gaze on me.

By the time we got to the main road we had been through a vacant lot, a couple of scrubby fields, and two broken down fences. I was picking burrs out of my shoelaces as Nancy stuck her thumb out and the cars whizzed past. There wasn’t much of a shoulder here and the ditches were brimming with water. I was just going to suggest to Nancy that we move down the road to a driveway where there was a wider gravel area, when I saw an approaching car slow down and begin to pull over. We never had to wait for long.

The Wild Cranes of November

The wild cranes of November – where are they?
Ah yes! They can be seen dimly above the lake,
six – no, seven – specks in clouds
that are an unambiguously snow-laden grey.

I strain to point them out to little Emily.
But they can be heard with an amazing clarity.

It is my sixtieth birthday and nothing works like before –
not eyes, not ears and I am punished in my knees
when I crawl with little Emily on the floor.

But the cranes are there and it is not so bad -
not like my grandfather, say, who got laid out,
face-down, younger then than I am now,
on the worst day of the worst year of the war.

So, come for the cranes I say to little Emily.
They can be heard with such clarity.
And to myself I say happy birthday.

Ulrich Wendt, 2006

FIRST CHAPTER OF FORECLOSURE by JACQUELINE D'ACRE

FORECLOSURE
Chapter One
May 21, 2005, 8:46 AM

If you want to know anything about horses in the New Orleans area, Lila’s Creole Diner in St. Tremaine Parish is the place to go. I’m Bryn Wiley and I had a writing assignment about a local breeder of Morgan horses. On the way to her place I drove up Highway 38 and stopped at Lila’s.

Inside, I walked past restaurant-style booths, tables and racks of groceries to the rear coolers. It was no surprise that words from horse people seated at the tables floated over boxes of Zatarain’s jambalaya mix to me: “…so that Morgan gal’s having some troubles…” came from a man’s high-pitched voice.

The subject of my article. I paused in the act of grasping a Diet Coke from a cooler. Resisting my usual embarrassment about eavesdropping, I listened closely.

“Yeah,” said another, deeper voice, “got twenty head or thereabouts. How’s she gonna feed ’em all?”

Embarrassment won. I grabbed the Coke and carried it to the counter at the front. As I paid, Lila, owner and Queen of the Horse Information Highway at this diner-convenience store-gas station, said, “Hey, girl, how’re you?”

“Good, Lila. Business looks excellent today.”

The place was noisy, the coffee smell rich and strong. I decided to dangle some bait. “I’m going over to visit Marcie Goodall. I’m doing a story on her breeding program.”

Lila’s thick eyebrows shot upward, creating generous folds in her forehead. She rang up the register, made change, then leaned forward and whispered, “Tommy Grayson was in here earlier. Upset. Marcie Goodall owes a big bill over at his place, Grayson’s Feeds.”

Poor Marcie. Once, long ago I’d faced similar problems. Tight money, many hungry horses, big unpaid feed bill.

Besides having luxuriant eyebrows, Lila was short, stout and dark with a mole near her mouth that could be interpreted as a wart or a beauty mark. She put change in my hand and I shoved it into my faded jeans pocket.

I said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Lila. It’s a tough spot for Tommy.”

Lila looked over my shoulder at the crowd of horsepeople overflowing the tables and booths. Their workday finished at nine a.m., all the hundreds of stalls cleaned, all the dozens of thoroughbreds galloped and hosed down, now they laughed, talked, and ate Lila’s ham, biscuits, eggs and grits. The owners were overweight, the riders under. The fragrance of fresh fried fat was in the air, along with the chicory coffee. Sun poured through the big front windows.

“Grayson’s holdin’ up her next feed delivery,” said Lila.

I frowned. A serious difficulty for Marcie. And I selfishly worried—could this cancel my article? I lived frugally. I needed that check. I said ’bye to Lila, and waved at Arthur Svenquist, a farrier and a friend. He sat squeezed between a huge owner and a diminutive exercise rider. Exercise riders often were jockeys who grew too tall to race, but still were small enough not to burden a fragile racehorse during its early training. I went outside and drove my bottle-green ’92 Tempo to Morgan Oaks Farm, situated on Word of God Church Road within St. Tremaine Parish, where I lived, scant miles from New Orleans.

Now I mounted the steps to the rear verandah of Marcie Goodall’s Gone-With-the-Wind house and saw the kitchen door was wide open. Immediately, I felt nervous.

“Hey, Marcie, you home?” I called in a polite voice while wondering: Why was the door open?
There was no response.

“Hellooo.” Louder. “Anybody? It’s Bryndis—Bryn—Wiley. Remember me?” The house was three stories tall with many rooms. Maybe she needed time to get to the kitchen.

I shifted from foot to foot and wiped sweat from my upper lip. TV weather reports called for more hurricanes and higher temperatures than 2004. That’d had the hottest summer of my two decades in Louisiana, and it was supposed to get warmer. Global warming? Who knew! But in this premature heat, my SPF-45 sunscreen slid around on my redhead’s skin.

I’d grown up in Canada, in a northern town called Thunder Bay, so this climate was a constant test. Here, I wore UV sunglasses over my green eyes, even during winter. And despite my years here, I still spoke Canadian, eh? Often Deep Southerners confused me with Yankees, which got me trouble. Beneath my façade of calm, I was getting impatient on the verandah of this ante-bellum house that belonged to a woman who bred Yankee horses: Morgans from Vermont.

I tried to hook my hair behind my ears, but the left side was boy-short, so it couldn’t go behind my ear. The right side stayed put because it was jaw-length. Sometimes I thought my off-kilter hairstyle reflected my personality.

Perhaps Marcie had dashed out to her stable? I was here only because an editor of the Morgan Horse of America magazine had phoned earlier. The editor had interrupted my mug of French Market coffee and my enlightenment-seeking from the Tao Te Ching. She needed me to fact-check an article I’d written last February about Marcie’s breeding program. Now I stood outside Marcie’s open kitchen door listening to a refrigerator hum. My curiosity grew, overtaking some of my earlier nervousness. I leaned in to look. I saw part of a kitchen table. Two cups and saucers, pink rosebuds on white china. Burnt coffee smell. And something rotten. I stepped in. Flies buzzed over a cantaloupe on a chopping block, halves fallen apart, chef’s knife beside it. The seeds, left in the fruit, sagged wetly sideways.

Legal-sized documents, dense with words, were fanned over the table. I walked closer, twisted my head and saw a Xerox copy of a check for thirty-five thousand dollars, made out to Marcie Goodall. My heart thumped. She hadn’t sold her stallion, had she? Other documents looked like they might have come from the St. Tremaine Clerk of Court’s office and others carried the logo of an Anton Delon, Mortgage Broker.

The burgeoning detective in me wanted to read them, but a building disquiet made me check out the kitchen. It was stark—old white metal cabinets like a World War II British hospital. But something in this room was off. A trembling in the air, like the fading echo of an old…scream?

“Hey!” I yelled. “Marcie! Where are you?” I considered going deeper into the house, but my natural timidity and Canadian good manners, stopped me. I was a reporter and an amateur detective who hated to pry.

The air conditioning wasn’t on. But the coffeemaker’s red light was, and the coffee a brown crust in the pot’s bottom. Without thinking, I flicked it off. Then I wondered: should I treat this as a crime scene? I unzipped the fanny pack I wore low, and I thought, rather sexily, on my hip: this being about the sexist thing I could allow on my person. I removed latex gloves and snapped them on. Was I overreacting? Since I’d stumbled into the solving of three murders over the past two years, I’d gotten in the habit of carrying the gloves.

Everyone forgets to turn off coffeemakers. People rush out leaving doors open. Most likely this is not a crime scene.

My God! I bolted from the kitchen, across the verandah and outside, down the broad steps. I skirted a pool. Spanish moss, drooping from an oak limb, slapped my face. I brushed it aside and kept on. Pea gravel crunched under my sneakers. At the barn entrance I stopped. Where’s the dog? There’d been a dog before. A Dalmatian.

My white cotton top stuck to my sweating front in a V-shape. My arms dripped perspiration. I stepped into the stable. Whinnies erupted like car alarms. I yelled, “Hush!” The cries ceased. I walked down the shavings-covered aisle between stalls. Overhead fans cooled me. A reek of ammonia shouted that stall mucking had been overlooked. Why? Help didn’t show?

I saw the mare and foal Marcie was so proud of in February. I’d paid Marcie my first visit then, to gather information for the story. The bay mare put her head over the stall door and nickered at me. An appeal for food. A smaller head stuck up and gazed at me with huge brown eyes. I looked into their stall—filthy. Feed, water buckets, empty. I wanted to water and feed every horse right now.

“One minute, gang, “I called out. “First I have to find your mistress.” If she wasn’t in here, I’d start trekking the pastures. I heard a doleful whinny, a snort, and rustling from the far end. My chest tightened.

My sneakers shushed through pine-scented shavings. A prickle ran over my damp skin when I stopped at the last stall. A brass plaque read: “Lightning Strikes Once.” Marcie’s stallion. I peered through the bars on the door. It was so dark inside, I couldn’t make out what, or who, was behind them. More shuffling. Had I seen a flash of white?

“Marcie?” My throat was dry.

My anxious breathing picked up another smell, different from decaying fruit or urine-soaked bedding. Like rotten eggs, but sweeter, with an undertone of blood. My abdomen lurched unpleasantly.

“Marcie?” Dread beat up from my belly.

“Marcie!”

A husky ‘her, herr,’ came from the stall. Horse, not human.

“Marcie, you in there?”

All the horses listened with me. Well. I slid open the door, moved forward. Then halted, foot raised. If I set it down, I’d step on a body.



.

CHARLIE WILKINS ON FORECLOSURE, A MYSTERY BY JACKIE D'ACRE

Jacqueline D’Acré’s fiction is as vivid and sultry and tumultuous – and as carnal, too – as the city of New Orleans in which it is set.

And it is populated by a Mardi Gras of characters who not only bring the primality and private passions of daily life into focus but create for themselves (and for the reader) a well-lit stage on which, page after page, the imagination is invited to get up and dance. They come out of back alleys, the old plantations, the worlds of finance and avarice and crime -- and of course out of the ever-fascinating and exotic world of horses.

D’Acré’s fiction is funny and lurid and theatrical; but as much it entertains, it also offers a thoughtful running commentary on the shadows and yearnings of the human heart. Like the story that is New Orleans, this is fiction in which anything can happen to anybody… and usually does.
—Charles Wilkins, author, A Walk to New York, et al

KOUHI AWARD

Who will be the 10th recipient of NOWW’s Kouhi Award?
Deadline for Nominations is April 1st!

The Kouhi Award recognizes outstanding contributions to the literature of Northwestern Ontario. The Kouhi Award committee considers the quantity and quality of the nominee's work, as well as the person's contribution to the growth & development of writing in Northwestern Ontario. The award is named in honour of writer Elizabeth Kouhi, who has published more than twelve books of poetry and children's fiction.

Previous winners have been Elizabeth Kouhi, Elinor Barr, Charles Wilkins, Thunder Bay Writers Guild, Rosalind Maki, Penny Petrone, Mary Frost, Jean E. Pendziwol and Dorothy Colby.

The nominee must be living, but need not currently live in Thunder Bay or region. The nominee does not have to be a member of NOWW.

Anyone may make a nomination. Nominations must include a one-page letter outlining the nominee's accomplishments, his/her contributions to the literature of Northwestern Ontario, and the name(s) and address(es) and phone number(s) of the nominator(s).

The recipient of the Kouhi award will be announced at NOWW's year-end celebration on Saturday, May 10, 2008 at the Prince Arthur Hotel at 7:00 p.m.

Nominations can be emailed to: rlankine@tbaytel.net or mailed to NOWW, 95 Winnipeg Ave., Thunder Bay, ON, P7B 3R1.
They should be clearly marked: Kouhi Award Nomination.

Foreclosure, by Jacqueline D'Acre

Please note: The title of the  book Foreclosure was changed to Hot Blooded Murder in 2018.


Jackie D'Acre's wonderful new mystery novel, Foreclosure, is out. The Thunder Bay launch preparations are on! Stay tuned here for place, date and time. The first chapter will be posted exclusive to this blog. Look for it on Saturday.

Here Jackie D'Acre speaks about her work

I love mysteries. Nevertheless, I was writing mainstream literary fiction and already had one book, Between Extremities, published.

I was wrestling with the dynamics of deeply disturbed characters in a novel I call Middle Class Poverty when a wild thought flashed through my mind: Wouldn’t it be fun to write a mystery—about deeply disturbed characters? Next I wondered: Could I? Mysteries have to be carefully plotted, just enough clues given so a reader can figure out whodunit, but not so many they figure out too soon and hence, spoil the book…could I pull this off?

I knew horses from my years as a breeder and horse commentator; I knew my locale of New Orleans and surrounds, then Bryn Wiley started to form in my head. An amateur detective different from others on the book racks: a writer, a horsewoman, not aggressive, even fearful, but willing to face her fears and challenge physically and emotionally dangerous people…. I gave her red hair, a black poodle, a black horse, a tiny farm and sent to her Lila’s Creole Diner where all the horse people in my fictional St. Tremaine Parish meet.

I started writing…and now you can hold this book in your hand. I hope you enjoy reading it as much I as I did writing it. Thank you! Jacqueline “Jackie” D’Acre.