Sweet things, p.18
Sweet Things, page 18
I’d shut off the mower and imagine him the way I had seen him one night when we pitched a tent in his parent’s backyard. For a while, we read comics by flashlight. Bobby produced a Playboy he had stolen from the top shelf of the drugstore. It was supposed to be hot but we grew colder and colder even after we shivered in our sleeping bags.
Bobby fell asleep first. I watched him. His face was motionless as he lay on his back with his arms were folded. That’s the way I imagine Bobby, Bob, Robert, when I walked away from filling in his grave. I promised his mother I would look after him.
For those who remained after the pills, there was hope for a few years. Young leaders appeared to take the helm. Things began to look up because we voted for them. And then the worst happened. The plague.
First, it took the healthy, then the elderly. Bob’s father had been a veteran. He’d been part of what everyone called The Greatest Generation, but when the specter came to Everard, he was one of the first to die. No one cared that we were dying. We were a long way from the nearest hospital. By the time his Dad’s ambulance arrived, the old man was gone.
The Legion was frightened of the specter so no one played the Last Post at his funeral. I brought a harmonica and played it while his wife stood sixty feet back and watched. She walked away before I had finished “Home on the Range.” I wasn’t surprised when she took ill not long after. I had watched as she kissed him goodbye in their driveway. I never heard whether she recovered or where she is buried. She probably didn’t have the money for the return trip to Everard.
I tamp down the mounds in the cemetery and level the graves that are so old they have sunk. I stand well back during services for the plague victims. I am not ready to enter history yet. My job is to remember. I wear a mask. I wear a face shield and a white suit with a hood and booties. I wear rubber gloves when I handle the caskets. I burn the rubber gloves after each committal. And I walk backward out of the burial ground.
Maybe I think I am undoing time by watching everyone I have lost recede before me, but I am adamant I will not become part of the past. I will not become a front porch or a crumbling bandshell. The future is what I cannot see behind me.
It may be dangerous to walk backward but I know every inch of ground in the graveyard and I know wherever I go within its bounds I will not fall into an open grave. But just in case I should, I carry a shovel with me on so I can dig my way out. It is a yellow shovel. I wear an orange workman’s vest, a green hard hat, and a red plaid shirt hanging over top of my blue jeans. Caution comes in many colors and I always stop and marvel when a rainbow forms over the town and frames the graveyard.
Rainbows are a sign from God or a postcard from Bobby promising terrible things won’t happen again to Everard. And I will keep backing away from everything I have known until I have backed away far enough to say, “That was the past. Now show me the future.”
The future insists I’m a blind boy, a walking, talking encyclopedia of the town’s story. I tell the future I am not blind but just a hostage here. I saw what the future was doing to us all. The future says it will make amends.
When I am ready to see what lies ahead I am certain it will be so enormous, so complex, and astounding I will wish I had another life to take it all in not as what has been but as what will be. And I will follow the rainbow over Everard to see where it ends.
Hyla Smiles
I collect old cameras at flea markets, so I set aside some of my days in Paris to search them out.
I bought a pricey Duarté. The film was still inside, and someone feared it might open, so they tied it shut with string piercing a cardboard a note that read “Le derrière été de Hyla, Juillet 40.”
Once home, I went to my darkroom and carefully developed the brittle film. The emulsion still held its image in the hidden silver, and I sat down and wept as the prints emerged from their chemical bath.
A young woman is smiling and sitting on a wall beside the Seine.
She points at something that has startled her beyond the image’s frame and with the other hand, she shades her eyes from the light so we cannot see into the future.
Literary Awards
Shortlisted, Edinburgh Flash Fiction Prize, Winter 2022
Shortlisted, Strands International Fiction Prize, “Archivist,” Autumn, 2021
Shortlisted, Strands International Fiction Prize, “The Langlois Bridge, Autumn 2021
Shortlisted, Carter V. Cooper Prize, Exile Editions, Toronto, 2021
Shortlisted, Strand International Fiction Prize, Mumbai, 2021
Lynn Fraser Fiction Prize, “Pas de Deux,” Freefall Magazine, Calgary, Alberta, September 2021.
Winner, Libretto Poetry Chapbook Prize, “Telling the Bees,” Nigeria, 2020
Strand International Fiction Prize (third), Mumbai, India, 2021
London Independent Fiction Prize (finalist) (UK), 2021
Shortlisted Fish Fiction Prize, (third), “Walnut,” Ireland, 2020
Freefall Prize for Poetry (winner), 2020
Shortlisted, Fish Flash Fiction Prize, “A Short Film about Seagulls,” 2020
Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction, “A Short Film About Seagulls,” 2020 (longlisted)
Montreal International Poetry Prize (shortlisted), 2020
Guernsey Poetry Prize (4 Runner up placings), 2020
Bath Short Fiction Prize, (UK), 2020
Pushcart Prize Nomination, from Nunum, “Leash,” Winter 2020.
Pushcart Prize Nomination from The Hong Kong Review, “The Ghosts,” Winter 2020
Anton Chekhov Prize for Fiction, (UK), 2019 (winner)
Bridport Prize for Poetry (UK), (shortlist), 2019
Retreat West Fiction Prize, (UK) (second), 2019
Short-listed, Tom Gallon Award for Fiction (London, Society of Authors, 2019)
Fish, Flash Fiction Prize (Ireland), double-long list, 2019
National Poetry Prize (UK), short-list 2019
London Independent Short Story Prize, double shortlist, 2018
Fish Publishing Poetry Prize (Ireland), shortlist and longlist, 2018
Carter V. Cooper Fiction Prize, Long list, 2018
Gwendolyn MacEwen Prize for Poetry, Long list, 2018
Bridport Prize for Fiction, longlist, 2018
The Woolf Poetry Prize, Winner, 2018
Freefall Poetry Prize, Third Place, 2018
Gregory O’Donoghue Prize for Poetry, Honorable Mention, 2018
Montreal International Poetry Prize, Shortlist, 2017
Raymond Souster Prize, Finalist, 2016
Short-listed, Carter V. Cooper Fiction Prize, 2016
Montreal International Poetry Prize, Shortlist, 2015
MacEwen Prize for Poetry (Exile Editions), winner best single poem, 2015, 2016
Barrie Arts Award Excellence in the Arts, Lifetime Achievement Award, 2015
Fred Cogswell Prize (Third Place) for best book of poems in Canada (2015)
Winner, Indie Fab Award Finalist (for the best book of poems published in North America for The Independent Booksellers Association of America, 2015
Winner, IP Medal, Independent Publishers Association of America, (for The Seasons), 2015
Short-listed, Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Prize (for “Tilting”), 2015
Third Prize, Freefall Magazine National Poetry Prize (for “The Thin Man”), 2015
Ontario Arts Council Works-in-Progress Grant, 2011
Top Ten, Finalist. TV Ontario Best Lecturer Competition, 2010
Finalist, James Hearst Memorial Prize, 2010
Finalist, Margaret Reid Formal Poetry Prize, August 2006
Finalist, Bridport Prize, UK, March 2006
Ontario Arts Council Works-in-Progress Grant, May 2005
Runner-Up, Word Press Prize, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2004 for Oceans
Honorable Mention, T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, 2000 (for Anywhere)
Ruth Cable Memorial Prize for Poetry, 1998
Finalist, Gerald Lampert Award, 1989 (for The Open Room)
E.J. Pratt Gold Medal and Prize for Poetry, 1980
E.J. Pratt Gold Medal and Prize for Poetry, 1981
Alta Lind Cook Award, 1981,
Alta Lind Cook Award, 1982
Ontario Graduate Scholarship, 1986
SSHRC Graduate Scholarship, 1987, 1988
McMaster University Graduate Fellowship, 1986, 1987, 1988
McMaster University Travel Fellowships, 1987, 1988
SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, 1987, 1988
Runner-Up, Gerald Lampert Award, 1989
SSHRCC Post-Doctoral Fellowship, 1988-1990
School of Continuing Studies Excellence in Teaching Award, 1996
Lifetime Pass, National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, New York
Ontario Arts Council Writers Reserve Grants, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021
About the Author
Bruce Meyer is the author of sixty-eight books of poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and literary non-fiction. His most recent collections of poems are McLuhan’s Canary (Guernica Editions, 2019), The First Taste: New and Selected Poems (Black Moss Press, 2018), Telling the Bees (Libretto Press Nigeria, 2020), and Grace of Falling Stars (Black Moss, 2021). His most recent collections of short fiction are A Feast of Brief Hopes (Guernica Editions, 2018), Down in the Ground (Guernica Editions, 2020), The Hours: Stories from a Pandemic (Ace of Swords, 2021), and Toast Soldiers (Crowsnest Books, 2021). His poems and stories have won or been shortlisted for numerous international prizes. He was the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Barrie from 2010 to 2014. He teaches at Georgian College and lives in Barrie, Ontario with his wife Kerry, their daughter Katie, and their dog, Daisy.
Acknowledgments
Some of the stories in this book have appeared previously in the following magazines, and the author is grateful to the editors and staff for their hard work and warm reception of the short stories in this book.
“Wheel” (Fictive Dream); “Cuba” (Retreat West Short Story Prize, shortlist);; “Toothbrush” (Hash Journal); “Rust” (London Independent Short Story Prize, shortlist); “The Trailer” (London Independent Short Story Prize, shortlist),; “Aces” (Wingless Dreamer and Wild World); “The Boiling Point” (A Chronicle of Magpies, Tightrope Books); “The Old Man” (Strands International Short Story Prize, shortlist); “Archivist” (Strands International Short Story Prize, shortlist); “Swimmer” (Emerge); “A Light Eulogy” (Bangalore Review); “Ventriloquism” (Release the Words); “Everard” (Grattan Street Press); “Wax” (Strands International); “The Cloud” (Flash Frontiers); “The Little Dog Laughed” (Bacopa Review & The Blanket Sea); “Same Time Next Year” (Free Spirit); “Flight” (London Independent Short Story Prize, shortlisted); “Birth” (Fictive Dream); “Arums” (Lothlorian Review & Crèpe and Pen); “Winter” (Uproar); “Rare Flower” (Fiction North); “A Short Film about Seagulls” (Bridport Flash Fiction Prize, shortlisted); “It’s a Girl” (Nunum; Nomintated for a Pushcart Prize); “Chupacabra” (formerly ‘Corridor of Light Through a Jewel, Fictive Review); “Happy” (Finding the Birds); “Sorrow” (Panoplyzine); “Gran’s Hats” (Unlimited Literature); “Afternoon” (Heartwood Literary Journal); “Urineworts” ‘(Winner, Anton Chekhov Prize, New Flash Fiction); “Rats with Wings” (Thirty West); How to Draw a Frog (shortlisted, Edinburgh Flash Fiction Prize); The Langlois Bridge (shortlisted, Strands International Short Fiction Prize).
The author wishes to thank Marty Gervais, Laura Black, and Howard Aster of Mosaic Press for their kindness and generous support of these flash fictions. The author also expresses his gratitude to Kerry Johnston, Katie Meyer, Margaret Meyer, and Dr. Carolyn Meyer for their kindness and belief in his writing.
Bruce Meyer, Sweet Things
