Words By Whittall

“Well, if I had to hazard a guess…” Bobby let his sentence trail off without finishing. He’d heard his mom use that phrase and it sounded so smart. Hazzard a guess . Bobby wasn’t smart, but he was good at guessing. He figured that sooner or later he’d guess what it was these two men wanted him to say.   “Don’t guess, Bobby. Tell us what really happened,” Farbester said slowly. “Something relating to her head.” Bobby figured the question was important since the detective asked it so often and spoke so clearly and slowly. “Her head?” he asked. “Her head,” Farbester repeated while the other cop motioned to the back of his own head with his index finger cocked just behind the right ear. Bobby couldn’t remember the other cop’s name, but he stunk of aftershave. He looked at the clock. Five hours. Five hours he’d been in this room with these men, and it still reeked of shitty aftershave. “Bobby!”   Farbester shouted. “Focus! Her head. What happened to her head?” “I don’t kn...

  “It’s not the fall that kills you,” Tom Rafuse always used to say. “It’s the landing!” Millicent Dunbar – Millie – heard Tom tell the gag many, many times. He had an easygoing manner, a penchant for pocket protectors, and the meaty paunch and polyester wardrobe of a much-beloved high school shop teacher, which he was. Tom’s wife, Rose, was downright dim – always at his side, looking up adoringly. Millie watched their delightful backyard barbeques through her kitchen window. Tom’s monster hamburgers and stupid repetitive jokes; Rose’s exquisite potato salad and chilled cherry cheesecake.   Of course, the laughter stopped when Rose was found dead at the bottom of the cellar stairs, her blood pooling under shelves of raspberry jelly and pickled beets. It was, indeed, the landing and not the fall that killed her. The coroner ruled the cause of death a broken neck. The manner of death she left undetermined. A tall detective with an odd moustache came to question Tom daily fo...

  Mother summons me to her office on Monday morning to scold me and  I’m transported back in time. I’m five years old. Her red pinched lips are shouting and her red-tipped finger is wagging at me. You horrible bad girl, where is Mother’s sweater? What did you do with it?   I’d taken it to bed with me, to feel something soft that smelled like her mix of menthol cigarettes and Chanel Number Five.   While she and the rest of the family were skiing in Mount Tremblant, I’d explored our big empty house, including Mother’s walk-in closet. The sweater, cashmere, lay crumpled on the floor. I hid there, amongst her clothes, shoes, purses and scarves, missing my family – my father who was rarely home but smiled and sometimes told me stories; my boisterous teenage brothers, who were rarely home but sometimes played games with me; and my mother who was always home and whom I tried so very hard to emulate and please. I hid the sweater under a pillow in my frilly pink bedroom. Rosi...

She can’t bear Charlie’s impossibly dark, beseeching eyes. He wants to go for a walk – needs to prance and run to the park, but she can’t do it. She scratches the fur behind his ears. “Sorry. Daddy’s not here for walkies and I can’t… can’t...” She’s tried to be brave for Charlie. She trembles, sickened by the gift a well-meaning friend brought when Joe died. This one’s blue. Even hanging behind the door where she can’t see it, she smells the leather. It reminds her of the last time she saw the old red leash. And how Joe used it.  

  Post card # 1 Idyllic beach at sunset Dear Florence Picked this card up years ago in Aruba, back in days of travel and cursive writing. I’ve decided to return to those days. Not the travel but handwritten, thoughtful discourse. I’ve tried email, but my laptop is far too slow to keep up with my brain and I, apparently, am too slow to keep up with stupid updates, the last one included switching the locations of the ‘reply’ and ‘reply all’ options, with catastrophic results. Now everyone subscribing to the Button Collection News knows that I am unhappy with the latest edition. 247 of them emailed me personally to let me know that they are unhappy with me, not the least of which because …   Postcard #2 A cat with a smug expression   Dear Florence Well not enough space here to explain my problem with the Button Collection News nor its rude readers. I suppose it also explains why I never got the hang of tweeting or twatting or whatever it is that Bryson uses. He...

I can’t believe I’m related to her. I can’t believe she used to be my best friend. I can’t believe that Nana is still controlling us from the grave. Kathy – It’s Katherine now please! – is my cousin but Nana had to explain that to us. We believed and acted like twin sisters whenever we were in the same place, which was every summer at Nana’s cottage down the road from Sandbanks. Races to the end of the dock, melting sneakers on the bricks by the fire, singing along to Uncle Mike playing Mama’s Got a Squeeze Box on his guitar. “What’s a squeeze box? What’s a squeeze box?” we’d shout. Mike would say it was an accordion, but he’d laugh in a way that made us think he was lying, so we’d ask again every time he played the song.  We might have felt we were missing something about the squeeze box but never about each other.  We’d hunt and hide treasures: odd-coloured rocks, a robin’s feather, the perfect piece of driftwood. We told each other stories in our own language. We sta...