"Never stop smiling, not even when you're sad. Someone might fall in love with your smile."
- Marquez

About me

I have a Chikum

Books

Jack Rathbone

In The Throes Of

From Canada By Land: The Myth of Red Wing

Degenerate Tiger

The fire in the trading hall hissed at me like I’d just insulted its mother. I stood stiffly near the hearth, coat hem smouldering slightly, eyes watering from the combined perfumes of sweat, burnt fat, aged gunpowder, and what I can only describe as the faint, treacly tang of old blood.
Across from me, slouched like a king in exile, sat Peter Pond. The man was immense, not just in girth but in presence. He filled the room like smoke, curling into every crack and corner. His hands were thick and scarred. His mouth revealed teeth sharpened more by hardship than dentistry. His small, cunning eyes glittered above a nose that had been broken once too often to sit straight. And he regarded me the way a wolf might regard a politely curious lamb.
I stepped forward in what I thought was an authoritative manner.
“Alexander Mackenzie. I’m to relieve you.”
I waited.
The silence stretched long enough for me to begin wondering whether he’d died sitting up.
Pond grunted, a sound that might have been laughter or a digestive complaint. He took a long pull from a blackened pipe and exhaled through his nose.
“Too clean,” Pond said. Then he spat into the fire.
He did not rise. He did not offer a hand. Pond leaned back, chair groaning beneath him, and squinted at me the way a butcher examines an unfamiliar cut of meat.
“Sit, lad. No sense dying in ignorance.”
I sat. The fire snapped between us. Behind him, in the shadows near the door, a tall, ragged man, with a massive nose which hung left of centre on his face, like a parasite taking over its host, watched without blinking, arms folded tight across his chest. His gaunt face and worn-out vest suggested he’d been in the trade more than most men lived. That was Butler.
Pond spoke for hours. He told of rivers so vast they swallowed the sky, forests older than memory, tribes that could vanish like smoke and strike like thunder. He spoke of starvation, frostbite, cannibalism. Of Frenchmen drowning in currents faster than bullets. He spoke of killing—a rival sleeping in his bed, wearing his drawers, a Dutchman who had “forgotten his place.” He did not confess. But he did not deny, either. His grin was crooked and wolfish as he spoke, daring me to ask. I did not. I sat enraptured, every word sinking deeper into me.
Pond tapped the ashes from his pipe into the fire and stared into the coals.
“You want to reach the western sea, boy?”
He studied me a long moment. Firelight crawled across his face.
“Well,” he said, and scratched his beard. “That’s one way to ruin yourself.”
I lifted my chin. My pride burned hotter than the fire.
“I’m ready. God Willing.”
Pond smiled, all teeth and smoke. “Even God gets lost out here.”
He leaned back into the chair as if the fire had grown cold, and closed his eyes. I rose, heart hammering, mind ablaze with visions of glory and hardship.
At the door, Pond cracked one bloodshot eye open.
“Ah, Butler,” he croaked. “There’s a new map—had it drawn up last fall. Better bearings. Give it to the boy, will you?”
Butler shifted but said nothing. His hand slipped into his coat.
I stepped into the snowlight, head high, unaware that the map in question would not be forthcoming. Behind me, Pond chuckled into the fire. The boy, I imagine he thought, was ready. Ready to be broken like the rest.***

Mr. Rathbone had taken the long way back from the coffee machine. He couldn’t say why. The coffee was bad, the corridor long, and somewhere at the end of it his wife was in labour with a child the doctors had already begun to have opinions about.
He paused outside the geriatrics wing, pretending to examine a bulletin board about blood pressure screenings. He had the peculiar sense that somewhere nearby, something was taking notes.
Across the room sat Mr. Gibbons, head of the Land Surveyors Association. He did not announce himself. He didn’t need to. The scent of menthol and oak drifted ahead of him—Aqua Velva, clean and declarative. He sat upright beside his sleeping father, shoes polished, tie straight, gaze steady as if grief ought to maintain proper posture. It wasn’t the smell Mr. Rathbone disliked. It was the standards attached to it.
“You look misplaced,” Mr. Gibbons said without turning.
Mr. Rathbone grunted.
Mr. Gibbons nodded once. “Try not to fumble the inspection.”
Mr. Rathbone stiffened. Later, all he remembered were the lights. And the peculiar awareness that the world had tilted without consulting him.
The child had been born with a tumour nestled beside his spine like an unwanted twin. The doctors had removed it within hours, then stood around in quiet disbelief, as if the child might reconsider and go back to wherever half-dead children come from.
“It’s unlikely,” one of them said.
“Unlikely things happen,” said the other, who had stopped arguing with unlikely things years ago.
In the hallway, nurses whispered the word miracle with the soft professional caution reserved for cases that could still go either way.
Von Hippel–Lindau Disease. A rare genetic disorder. Tumours in the eyes, the spine, the adrenal glands, the kidneys. Recurrence likely. Monitoring required. Indefinitely.
“For how long?” Mr. Rathbone asked.
“For life,” the doctor replied.
When he was finally permitted to see the child, Jack lay swaddled and small, breathing evenly, as if mildly inconvenienced by the entire affair. There was already a scar. There would be others.
In the hallway behind them, the faint trace of menthol and oak lingered.
***

Poetry

Short Stories

The Girl With Two Heartbeats

Sara Moon was born in the fall at 3:35 in the morning with two heartbeats, caramel eyes that wandered the room as if searching for someone who had stepped out only moments before, and by noon the nurse was already complaining that the child refused to sleep. The midwife heard it first and counted again, pressing her ear harder against the small wet chest. When she looked up, she did not say anything for a moment. Then she told the mother that sometimes the heart echoes itself for a few minutes after birth and that it would pass.“What is wrong with her?” her mother said.“She’s a curious little one,” the nurse said. “Hasn’t stopped looking around yet. But eventually she’ll tire herself out and sleep.”The nurse set the baby down again beside her mother, and she and the midwife left the room without hearing the mother clarify that she meant the second heartbeat. A few hours later the doctor came in with a faint whistle in his nose, and Sara’s mother kept looking toward the counter for a kettle that was not there.“Is she going to be all right?”“Oh, she’ll sleep eventually.”“But the second heartbeat.”The doctor listened, frowned, and said nothing. For several weeks the doctors listened carefully and argued among themselves, but by the time Sara was old enough to walk the matter had settled into the background of her life, like a clock in another room that no one bothers to wind.“I’ve heard of stranger things,” one doctor said. “In Colombia there was the report of the girl turned into a spider. And in Japan the emperor has been suffering from a spell of hiccups now entering its third year, and the finest doctors in the world have not been able to stop it.”“Who said there were two anyway? It’s probably suggestion.”“Perhaps we should consult a priest.”“Or a shaman.”In the end they did nothing at all, which proved to be the most practical solution. By the time Sara was five the whole town knew she had two heartbeats, and by the time she was ten no one thought it worth mentioning anymore. It seemed, after several weeks of counting, that two heartbeats were not nearly as troublesome as a child who refused to sleep.Sara Moon clapped to a different beat than everyone else. When she was three, she played in the park with the other children. To her, the rest sounded mistaken, as though they had all agreed on the wrong beat. A girl named Samantha stopped clapping and looked at her in confusion. Sara, missing several teeth and grinning like a cheerful gargoyle, turned toward her mother on the bench.“Mother,” she said, still clapping, “why ithn’t Thamantha clapping with uth? Why ithn’t she thinging?”She mostly learned to ignore the two small rhythms that argued gently inside her chest, except on nights when the house had fallen asleep and the second beat refused to follow the first. As a child she sometimes paused in the middle of the yard and turned slowly toward the west, listening to the restless rhythm in her chest as if it had suddenly remembered something important.
By the time she entered school most people had forgotten there had ever been anything unusual about her. She sometimes felt the odd sensation that someone had just left the room, although no door had opened and no footsteps had crossed the floor. When she reached adulthood, the second heartbeat had become little more than a quiet companion. It occasionally wandered elsewhere, but it caused her no real trouble. She married and settled into the comfortable routines of a life that appeared perfectly ordinary.
Her husband brought home fresh flowers every Thursday because Sara had once mentioned that was the day they looked happiest at the market. He trusted routines and believed that most things in life could be understood if given enough time. On the third night after their wedding, while they lay together in the quiet of their new home, he placed his head against her chest and listened.
“There are two,” he said after a moment.“Yes,” Sara replied.He listened a little longer, then nodded, as if confirming something minor.“Well,” he said, “it seems you have more to give than most of us.”He kissed her and did not mention it again. Their life together settled into a comfortable rhythm. They shared meals, small arguments, and the quiet repetition of days that never seemed to hurry anywhere. There was no lack of happiness between them, and nothing in their life suggested that anything was missing.Once, as he embraced her, he paused.“Why is your hair wet?” he asked, though the day was dry.She made a face and laughed. Then couldn’t stop laughing. He began laughing too, and the question was forgotten.The doctors returned, listening with their instruments as though the answer might have arrived in the intervening years.“Still there,” one would say, as if reporting the weather.“Still there,” another would agree.They spoke of valves and echoes and rare conditions that did not trouble the body, and after a while even these explanations grew tired and stopped appearing altogether.Sara sat at the table, her hair flowing over her shoulder like black water. She heard the lock turn and rose to greet her husband as he stepped through the door. She was wearing nothing. They ate fish with rice. Another knock came, and her husband went to answer it.“My name is Kenji Yamamoto,” the man said in a measured voice. He dressed with the careful precision of a man who mistrusted disorder.
He wore a stethoscope around his neck so comfortably that Sara’s husband briefly wondered whether the doctor examined himself between patients.“I’m here to see the woman with two heartbeats.”He had heard of her case years earlier from a mentor who had once cured the emperor’s prolonged fit of hiccups. He stood in the doorway longer than seemed necessary. He did not look at the husband, but at the house itself, as though trying to recall where he had seen it before.When he stepped inside, he paused.