"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

From Canada By Land: The Myth of Red Wing

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.***

Degenerate Tiger

The boy carried fire in his pockets.
I only leaned close to see if it would burn.
His name was a wound I licked until it sang.
His hands were storms, and I was the lightning that answered.He didn’t stop going to the piano bars. But he started drifting elsewhere, too. It could’ve been a Tuesday. Or a Thursday. He’d been drinking for a few days, maybe more. He remembered a bar, a cab, a hallway full of paintings. Then: the scent.
It was his third glass of Ardbeg. Or fourth. The room had taken on a soft glow, like everything had been dipped in varnish. A jazz trio played something shapeless and slow. Waiters in white jackets drifted past like ghosts with trays of amber liquid. Henry stood alone near the bar, swirling smoke in his glass, feeling vaguely ornamental.
That’s when he caught the scent—something soft and wrong, like flowers left in the dark too long. Not perfume exactly, but memory masquerading as one. Jasmine, maybe. Or matches. He turned toward it and saw no one. Just a mirror. Except—there was a shape in the reflection. A woman, facing away. Pale shoulders. A black dress that shimmered like oil under candlelight. Hair pinned up with something—was it jade? A pin shaped like a wave, or a wing? He spun around. Nothing. Just a few men laughing near the buffet. A woman in a green pantsuit scolding a waiter. But no one in black. No jade pin.
When he turned back to the mirror, she was gone. He blinked. Then laughed to himself. “Too much peat,” he muttered. The music hiccupped, lost key, then righted itself.
Later—minutes? An hour?—she reappeared. No longer a trick of glass. At the edge of the room, beside a floor lamp with a crooked shade. She wasn’t walking; she seemed to be placed there, like a prop in a dream. She didn’t move. She looked bored. Or maybe wounded. Her eyes scanned the crowd the way one watches fish in a tank—curious, distant, unimpressed. And when those eyes landed on Henry, he felt them like a hand against his chest. The feeling was something like déjà vu. Or drowning. He glanced down, suddenly aware of his shoes. He wasn’t sure they matched. He forgot how to hold his glass.
The woman tilted her head, just slightly. Her lips curved. Was it a smirk or a warning? Henry couldn’t tell. Then she turned and slipped into the hallway leading to the back of the venue, not fast, not slow, like someone who always knew the way. Coy enough to make you chase, bold enough to make you trip, and woman enough to leave you glad you fell.
He followed. Left, right, then a turn that didn’t exist. Lost. Into a room filled with laughter, a bright chandelier hanging over a round table, and on top a massive novelty-sized bottle of Teachers Whisky. Ten guests sat howling like politicians and talking like animals, drinking and eating fried fava beans. But he didn’t see her.
“Come sit,” they said. Several voices at once. And all at once he was sitting. Then there, at the door. She appeared. Radiant, curvy, with a neck like a calligraphy stroke—delicate, elegant, a little too long to be entirely mortal. Athena herself might have stared daggers. Zeus the eagle was somewhere circling above, waiting to swoop in and steal her.
She slid into the seat beside Henry like a ripple joining a lake and asked, “Do you know any drinking games?”
“No,” Henry fumbled.
“Okay, I’ll teach you one. It’s easy.”
She poured two water glasses to the brim—three hundred millilitres of whisky each. Henry looked at her in disbelief, half expecting a rulebook or explanation. Instead, she handed him one and beamed. Her skin was clear, unbothered, as if time deferred to her mood. Then she shouted, “Go!”
And down it went. Her entire glass. Five seconds flat. A clean, effortless gulp. She slammed the empty cup on the table with the force of a war drum. Henry blinked. Looked around. No one else even noticed. His eyes darted, panicked, searching for context.
Her eyes sparkled like they had a secret. Then, as if casting a spell, she bellowed, “Represent your country.”
The absurdity of it nearly made him laugh. But her gaze cut through him. It wasn’t seductive—not exactly. It was inviting. Like someone pulling you by the hand out of a dark room into sunlight. He felt again—unbearably, out of nowhere—the weightless joy of childhood. Of being yanked out of bed by his sister Liz when he was small and sick and scared, and she, the only one who seemed to see him, would play with him on the floor until the monsters went quiet.
Her look carried that same strange promise: no filters, no tricks, just play with me. It undid him. His chest clenched. His throat tightened. He raised the glass and drank. It scorched his tongue and throat, burned down to his ribs. His eyes watered. But he finished it. Slammed the glass down. Let out a burp. A small one.
She responded with a deeper, fuller belch—like a prizefighter showing the rookie how it’s done. Then she laughed. And what a laugh. Loud. Real. From the belly. From the soul. The kind of laugh that makes you want to be funny, want to stay in its orbit, want to never again be alone. Henry joined in without knowing why.
Then she stood. Tugged his arm. Hugged him. A real hug. Like they’d known each other for years. Like she’d missed him. Then she waved to everyone, turned, and left. Gone.
Henry stood there, half-smiling, half-lost. His body still glowed with warmth, but his brain hadn’t caught up to the absence. He looked like a man who’d been told good news and bad news in the same breath and wasn’t sure which to believe. Even her perfume didn’t linger. It left with her, like it had other places to be. Was she going to return? He didn’t get her name. But again he felt that strange feeling like he didn’t know how to move his feet.
And without knowing how, he sat back down. Stared at the table. Looked around at the others, still chatting, drinking, oblivious. Someone new sat down in the chair next to him, where she had sat and laughed, and he nearly pushed them out, as if saving a seat for a ghost. The person, a slender man with a waxy face and one gold cufflink, picked up the glass, inspected it, wiped a smudge of lipstick off, and poured himself a glass whisky. And Henry felt his stomach was on the wrong side of his body. It hurt. Like he’d been laughing for hours. Had he? In his mind she’d been there for a split second, but his body said otherwise.
He couldn’t recall what came next. How he got home. Whether he’d said goodbye to anyone. It was as if someone had folded time in half and left him in the crease.

Jack Rathbone

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

i try to hide

i try to hide

i try to hide from you
but your eyes
are there already
swinging their legs
you wave
hello againelsewhere
small polite moons
cracking under careful feetbut with you
ands and buts remove their shoes
throw their coats on the chair
commas curl up on the couch
periods fall asleep on the windowsillheat
thighsweat
colour climbing your cheeks
you are the room
where moonlight spills wine
where my breath
sleeps in your shadowi open my mouth
and the truth
walks out ahead of me
like it knows the way home

Short Stories

The Girl With Two Heartbeats

The Goose Who Wanted Curls

The Goose Who Wanted Curls

Once upon a time, in a quiet glade beside a mirror-bright lake, lived a goose with the most elegant neck in the flock. Her name was Goosie, and while the other geese honked and waddled and nipped at breadcrumbs, Goosie dreamed.
Not of worms.
Not of warmer ponds.
But of being human.
“Oh, to wear shoes!” she sighed one day, flapping her wings dramatically. “To comb my hair! To write poetry and sigh at the moon!”
Her sisters rolled their eyes. “You have feathers. You honk. You are a goose.”
But Goosie would not be dissuaded. She lifted her beak to the heavens and cried:
“God! Make me human!”
And to her great surprise, God answered. His voice drifted down like a breeze over the reeds.
“Little goose, it is not your time. In the next life, perhaps.”
“But I want it now!” she squawked. “I am ready for giggles and coffee! For hats and heartbreak! I can suffer!”
Then, her voice softened. Not the honk of a goose, but something aching and new.Let me find a friend—
a bond the wind cannot scatter,
a presence that stays
like the warmth of sunlight.
Place this longing somewhere in my path,
in the quiet places
where souls recognize each other.And God replied:Child of feathers and light,
people wear masks that grin their little lies.
They wound without meaning,
they make a home in your heart
and then fade away,
like footprints in the rain.But Little Goosie lifted her head.

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.