Fiction Friday Four

I can’t even recall which shocked me more at the time, Jims not being dead or my dreams being real. I remember the man, though. One tall drink of water with his long denim clad legs, broad shoulders under a worn blue chambray shirt, and wearing, in Montreal of all places, a cowboy hat. Which he totally carried off, as it happens. It suited him somehow.

Seventeen years old, mired in grief and overwhelmed with hormones I thought he’d walked off the cover of some Louis L’Amour novelette. Dead handsome and those legs…I would have paid good money at the time just to watch those legs. Yeah, he was too old for me - by a few hundred years, as it happens – but seventeen was a very in-between age for me: too naïve in some ways, but losing my mother as a child and now Jims, too old as well. So when Mr. Cowboy suggested meeting somewhere quiet I agreed. He said there were some things he needed to explain. Ya think? Damn straight there were.

I slipped away from my family – not hard to do, the three of us left reeling with grief – and took the back stairs out of the hospital and headed for the park that fronted the hospital along its whole length. I never could figure out if that was a good thing or a bad thing. If I was confined to a hospital bed, what would a park be for me: a bit of green peace to break the monotony of grubby off-white walls or a constant reminder of what I was missing? Right now, though, it was a green oasis in the middle of a busy city, somewhere I could listen to what this stranger had to say without risking my own safety by being completely alone. Naïve, maybe: stupid not at all.



So long ago, but I remember everything so clearly. The day had some heat to it, as sometimes happens mid-September. The sun was warm on my face, with a light breeze blowing. Not hard, just enough to tease my wildly messy hair. Tea-coloured hair my dad always said. Wild curls that I never bothered about, preferring to let it float in a halo around my head or – an indication I was being serious – pulled back in a tight braid away from my face. I could hear birds in the trees, and every now and then the sound of leaves falling mingled in with the sound of the remaining leaves stirring on their branches. Traffic sounds too, but muted by the size of the park. I looked up and saw the Cowboy striding towards me (merciful heavens, those legs!): time to find out what the hell was going on. Time over for the calm before the storm.