Download the PDF This story is in honour of my daughter’s school, which is in the middle of a seismic upgrade (due to be completed in 2017), which will also be Canada’s 150th. Sunday May 24, 1964 Lighthouse Park, West Vancouver He could see the glow in the east; it was the pre-dawn glimmer. Exhausted, he sat on a rocky outcrop, not far from the Lighthouse. He was dirty and shivering from his exertions much…
Download PDF December 24, 2017 The fact that it is Christmas Eve is technically an accident, but the Christmas traditions of peace and salvation were never more desirable than now. I am taking pen to paper. A novel idea in this high tech era, but we are under communications blackout in preparation for launch in two hours. I also feel the need to put this story down. I figure if you are seeing this in…
Download PDF The Toronto Eaton’s Centre at Christmas time is a great place for chance encounters but, because of the way my brain is wired up, it’s rare that I’m ever surprised. In a significant exception, on December 13, 2013 Kendra (I didn’t yet know her name) seemed to appear out of nowhere on the third level of the Eaton’s Centre near the Trinity Square entrance. Our shoulders connected hard and I grabbed for her,…
Recap (See The Smudge on Orion’s Belt for details.) In 2008, Mélanie Beauchamp discovered an usual object heading toward Earth. On December 25, 2009 she was witness to The Beauchamp Object being manoeuvred into orbit around Earth. The Object was the first piece of alien space junk ever, measuring 350 km long, 140 km at its widest and 70 km at its highest. And there it sat, in a slowly decaying orbit. January 27, 2012…
Denzel: Jack arrived at my door shortly after his bicycle accident. Usual idiot. He left the house thinking he was being a good father and husband by getting on his mountain bike and blasting around the city instead of doing what he wanted to do: whack the shit out of his wife, son and daughter. Of course, he was too much of a man to wear a helmet so, when he came off the Burrard…
Lying in bed dying of liver disease is pretty boring. But the ghost was making it interesting. He kept wandering around the room, sitting impatiently in a chair, standing and looking at my chart, looking over the nurses and doctors’ shoulders as they did their usual rounds. I didn’t know this guy. He looked around my age – 52 – and was anglo-looking, taller than me. I assumed he was a ghost because no one…
December 22, 2008 Mélanie Beauchamp was star gazing. During the Christmas period of 2008, Vancouver had enjoyed unusual amounts of snow with lower than normal temperatures. Mélanie thought she’d dodged the weather in Montreal by coming to Vancouver to visit friends. Montrealers, at least, knew how to use shovels. Vancouverites, when they try to clear snow, seem to make the attempt with garden spades and flimsy plastic shovels. Mélanie did not have astronomy on her…
Tom entered his Yaletown apartment, put his laptop case on the hall book case and concluded that Christmastime was a bad time to visit the doctor. It was December 22, a Monday, and it was nearly 1 PM. He had chosen not to go back to the office after his visit to the doctor. He had text-messaged his staff to say he was afflicted with a bad case of It’s-Nearly-Christmasitis: a good lie that involved…
Editor’s note. In the summer of 2075, during the production of Daniel Turner’s biography, I had been assured by those who knew the man that I would find unusual things in his personal writings and notes, which were publicly released five years after his death. I had not expected to find evidence to suggest that he and his friend Dale Cromwell were either delusional or, as their diaries suggest, from an alternative universe. Just writing…
You know it’s a bad day when you wake up in hospital and you hear, “Mr. Turner; I’m a nurse. Do you understand me?” It was worse when I realized I could not speak and could only nod an acknowledgement to the nurse. She said, “You’ve been in a coma.” The advantage of no speech was that it avoided really stupid and self-injurious questions. My hands were also too wobbly to write on a pad…