Short Stories – Page 2

The Squirrel & The Owl

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Excerpted from the children’s novella, Flibber T. Gibbet, this story-within-a-story sees a quick-thinking squirrel trying to avoid being eaten by a predatory, but not unsympathetic owl.

Ptero was going about his business one evening, searching for nuts, berries and tasty insects to eat, when – whoosh – Bubo, the owl swept down and snatched him up in her talons.

He struggled and squirmed, but she held him fast in her powerful grip, and he knew he could not survive long. He had to think quickly if he was ever to see his nest again.

‘Bubo!’ he gasped. ‘Bubo, why would you bother eating a scrawny little squirrel like me. Winter has just ended, and I’m not much more than a skeleton right now. Let me go, and I promise to return to the very branch you snatched me from in three month’s time. Then I will be plump and delicious, and make a mouthful… er, a beakful.’

Because squirrels always keep their word, Bubo agreed to Ptero’s request, and returned on the appointed evening to find his prey, plump and well-fed, on the same branch where they’d first met. Bubo swooped down and carried him off again.

‘Bubo,’ Ptero pleaded this time. ‘Why would you tear me to pieces and eat me up now, when it is the season I am preparing to make many meals for you?’

‘Explain yourself, and be quick about it, for I am hungry,’ Bubo demanded.

‘It’s springtime, and I must mate. Soon there will be many of me scampering amongst the branches for you to catch and eat. Three more months, and I promise to return so you can me carry off a third time. But by then there will be many more like me for you to feast on.’

To Bubo this made good sense, so he returned Ptero to their favourite branch. ‘I shall see you in three months my little friend, then – sadly – I will have to gobble you up, for that is my nature,’ she said as she flew off.

So Ptero met a mate, and they had a family, and after the three months past he returned for Bubo to catch again.

‘What am I to say now,’ Ptero fretted, shivering with fright. He thought, and thought, but no new ideas came to him before Bubo glided silently overhead and snatched him up a third time.

‘So Ptero,’ the owl said as they flew away, ‘what reason are you going to give me tonight to keep me from my dinner?’

Ptero had nothing to offer, so he went limp in Bubo’s talons, closed his eyes, and prepared for his grisly fate.

‘Before I devour you, let me ask a question,’ Bubo said.

Eager to postpone what was surely coming, even for a heartbeat – and I can tell you, a squirrel’s heart beats very quickly when he is afraid – Ptero replied, ‘Please ask, and I will do my best to answer.’

‘What time of year is it, my scrumptious little friend?’

Now, to Ptero this seemed a silly question. But he pretended to be puzzled, and took as many wing beats as he possibly could to answer. ‘It is the season of long days and warm weather,’ he said at last.

‘Indeed,’ Bubo agreed. ‘It is also the season of abundance, is it not, when an owl can catch more food on a single night’s hunt than she could eat in a week.’

‘True,’ Ptero agreed.

‘And what season will arrive in three month’s time?’

‘Why that would be the season of falling leaves and withering fruit.’

‘So what might a wise owl do – and there is no such thing as an owl who-hoo-hoo isn’t wise – what might a wise owl do with a bit of prey, if her stomach and larder were already full, but winter was on its way?’

Ptero hesitated, fearful of making a guess. But he finally screwed up enough courage to say, ‘He might return a little squirrel to its branch and come back again in three month’s time, when his larder and belly will both be empty?’

‘Ah!’ Bubo hooted happily. ‘Excellent idea. Why, if you weren’t shaped like a plump little rodent, I might mistake you for one of my kind.’

And so for many seasons Ptero and Bubo have been getting together for their pleasant flights, and neither has figured out in all that time why one should eat the other. You could even say they’ve become good friends.

~ The End ~

Believing is Seeing

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Some people walk right by Gwen’s place, and don’t even notice. They might be thinking about mortgages, or family problems, or jobs… or the latest national fixation, COVID-19. But Kirsten and friends weren’t distracted by any of that. The cold bright air made them happy, and the flutter of dark-eyed juncos at a feeder across the street… Until they were startled by the great, big, green Grinch nailed to the post under Gwen’s balcony. “Won’t steal my Christmas,” Kirsten pouted angrily, and everyone on the line agreed, even though Mrs. P, their daycare teacher, had to laugh. Snowmen, elves, and Santa himself crowded Gwen’s yard, too, fastened to sticks in the surrounding brick planter and tacked to the clapboard siding of her house. So Kirsten felt pretty sure that – as always – the Grinch would come to be a believer, too. It was Mrs. P who pointed to the painted rocks nestled in the grass along the planter wall. Kirsten figured they must be nice rocks, judging by their colours and shapes. “Life is short, eat dessert first,” Mrs. P read one. Kirsten agreed! “Less todos; more todays!” advised another. Kirsten’s favourite, though, was the one with the angel on it that said, “Believing is seeing!” Even though Mrs. P said “whoever wrote it got it wrong way round.”

About this Moment

Our neighbour, Gwen, loves Christmas, and goes all-out with decorations every year. This Moment was inspired when a gaggle of daycare kids all hanging onto a cord, with their daycare teacher in the lead, stopped to wonder at Gwen’s display. All I had to hand was my iPhone, so I took some pictures with that, and got one or two that were good enough to use. This is a fictional rendition. None of the names are real, and actual events have been interpreted to fit. Hope you enjoy.

CraigSpenceWriter
More Moments

The Speed of Light

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A theory of special relativity for the soul

Surely there’s enough room in the universe for everyone who has died.

That’s a relief, I suppose. It means there might… just might… be a heaven out there, even a god, who only need occupy a tiny corner of the 13 billion light year breadth of measured space and time… and who knows what lies beyond the known, how far we’d have to travel in our transcendental spaceships to reach the ever expanding membrane of infinity.

Language can say things it’s impossible to comprehend. Thirteen billion light years, for example. Uncle Franklin tried to describe the speed of light for me once. “If I flicked on a light switch, here in Chemainus, say at the tip of Bare Point, you’d see the beam – it’s a wave, actually, but for the sake of argument, let’s say you’d see that beam in just over a second, if you were standing on the moon, say in the Sea of Tranquility… one-point-two-five-five seconds to be exact, that’s how long it would take.”

Uncky Frank couldn’t have understood that most nine year olds wouldn’t have a clue what the heck he was talking about, of course. Or what the speed of light had to do with my father’s coffin, making its slow progress down the centre aisle of our church, borne on the shoulders of six strong friends and relatives. He was just trying to describe, after the fact, the theoretical speed a soul could fly according to his own theory of special relativity.

Mum and Dad used to laugh at Uncky Frank and his ‘weirdo theories’. “He should leave the science to Einstein, and stick to building houses,” Dad said. “He’s good at that.”

“His inquiring mind takes him to strange places,” Mum agreed, as if Uncky Frank’s brain was a poorly trained Pitt bull yanking him around on its leash.

They loved him, though. He was everybody’s favourite uncle.

“Your dad isn’t very far away, once you know ‘C’,” he said, sitting beside me at the wake. “That’s the constant that stands for the speed of light in a vacuum,” he added, when I gave him a puzzled, pleading look. “Three hundred thousand kilometres per second.” He smiled benignly.

“How far is it from your head to your heart?” he persisted. “Show me.” I put my left hand over my heart; my right on top of my head. “That’s how far away your dad is from you, always,” Uncle Franklin said. “He’ll never leave, and – at the speed of light – he’ll be with you in an instant, whenever you need him.”

Uncky Frank had a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, on a special shelf next to his favourite armchair. He’d read it every evening, as if it was the world’s longest novel, from A to Z with occasional side-steps to look up an incomprehensible word in another article, then another word in the explanatory article, and another, and another, and so on.

“Unless someone’s reading it, these are just lumps of masticated wood, glue and fake leather, gathering dust,” he told me once. “Knowledge doesn’t reside in books. Squiggles on a page don’t mean anything until someone reads them.”

To his dying day Uncky Frank claimed to be an atheist. I visited him near the end. Gaunt, pallid, and weak as he was, he still smiled and gazed at me with his pale blue eyes. He could tell what I was thinking, and put his left hand over his heart; his right on top of his head. “That’s how far away from you I’ll be, if you ever need me,” he said.

I tried not to show it, but he laughed. “Just cause I’m what you call an atheist, doesn’t mean I don’t believe something. A few more days, and I’ll be gone, but I’ll live on in your memory,” he smiled benignly.

“And when I die?”

“You’ll live on in the memories of your friends, your colleagues, your family. And I’ll be a smidgen of that, which is enough for me.”

Uncky Frank bequeathed me his set Encyclopedia Britannica. I browse them from time to time, but there’s no reference to any history of mine in there, just antecedents. The speed of light hasn’t changed, though, and the time it takes a beam to get from Bare Point to the Sea of Tranquility on the moon.

End Note:

Writing is rarely a linear process. For example, this video has a typical pedigree. Yesterday I was working on Episode 43 of The Mural Gazer. In this scene Buddy paddles out onto Cowichan Lake, teetering on the brink of suicide. There, he encounters the spirit of Hong Hing, the Chinese merchant, bootlegger and gambling den operator, depicted in Chemainus Mural #4, who is tying to dissuade him. Although he’s alive and talking, Hong Hing is decked out as a deceased, oriental patriarch, and he’s floating to the forever-after on the mirror-calm surface of the moonlit lake.

I’m on aqua incognito for this description, so I started researching Chinese funerary traditions online, a fascinating glimpse into the rites of an ancient culture.

At the same time, I have been trying to get my head around Immanuel Kant’s metaphysical theory of Transcendental Ideals. Although that’s not the kind of subject matter you can throw undiluted into a novel, as a thematic undercurrent, I believe speculative philosophy enriches stories. And the rites I was learning about the Chinese belief in an afterlife, particularly the burning of Joss Paper and representations of things the deceased need to be happy in their new world, evoked by association Kantian proofs of god, heaven and immortality.

There’s no logic to the sequence that lead to The Speed of Light, but its origins do trace back to The Mural Gazer.

Online readings & trailers – How to begin?

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I’m not going to be able to pack everything we need to know about setting up to produce video readings and trailers into a single blog post, so if there are topics within this topic you’d like me to explore and expand on, get in touch and let me know.

And if you’re really interested in the subject, don’t take my word for it, go online and get other perspectives. My take on what makes an effective video reading or trailer for websites and social media is unique; there are plenty of other variations on the theme you’ll be able to find, conferring with Dr. Google.

That said, let’s get underway. Before you actually do anything in the physical realm, play and replay an imaginary version of your video in your head, and view each showing from a different seat in your mind’s-eye theatre.

Take one: an artist’s POV. Ask what you want people to take away from your video? And what you want them to do? Buy your book? Attend a reading? Absorb a philosophical perspective and share it? Change their attitude about something? Know who your viewer is, and what you want to say to him before you set out producing your video.

Take two: put yourself in the ‘average viewer’s’ seat. What’s going keep her there? What is it about your story you want to emphasize? Do you want to make her laugh? Arouse her sense of curiosity? Send chills up and down her spine? Disgust her? Get her to like you? Wax philosophical? Wonder what comes next?

Take three: now you’re sitting in the producer/director’s chair. You have to figure out what’s possible and how to make what’s possible happen in the final cut. As you play through the video, ask yourself what kind of equipment you’ll need to make each scene happen? What skills you might have to acquire? How long it’s going to take to produce your masterpiece? Who you’ll need to involve in the production?

Take four: You’re the Production Manager. Your job is to figure out who and what you will need to bring together, when and where in order to get the video trailer or reading done. Once your assessment is finished, you should have a pretty detailed, step-by-step chart of how to get from scene-one to your finished video.

Now you know what you want to do, it’s time to set your ‘system’ up so you can keep track of how you’re doing. Even a simple video project can generate dozens of files, sticky notes, emails, and so on. Having all that data stored in accessible, navigable locations is absolutely essential.

I use three Adobe programs to generate elements of a video production: Photoshop (composite photos and slides), Premier Pro (assembling the video), and Audition (sound production). I also use stock sound and image services to get material I can’t photograph or record myself. Most productions require dozens of photos, videos and sound clips. All those elements have to be organized and coordinated, if you don’t to lose your way.

Typically, I open a folder for the entire project in File Manager on my Mac. It will contain sub-folders, the Premier Pro project file; and the final MP4 video. The sub-folders will be labelled: Photos-Images, Video, Audio, Slides, Elements, Correspondence, Text, and so on. You get the idea.

Once I start assembling and editing the video in Premier Pro, I will create a similar set of folders for Photos-Images, Video, Slides, Elements and Audio. As I need materials, I import them into the mirrored Premier Pro project folders, and when they are placed in the video, I colour code them, so I’ll know what’s been used and what’s on deck.

Although Premier Pro lets you import whole folders from File Manager into a project, I don’t do that. I prefer to transfer them one at a time. If it’s a larger production, I will also colour code imported files in my Mac’s File Manager, so I can ignore them when I’m looking for materials later.

All this may sound bureaucratic and tedious, and if you’re among those who can keep a dozen balls in the air at the same time and grab them on the fly, you may be able to do without the bother. I’m not. I find a structured process for gathering, storing and retrieving materials during a video production allows me to focus on the aspects of a project I really enjoy, the creative activity of transcribing a vision from my imagination into the mind-space of an audience.

Let sleeping dogs lie

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How do you define that precise moment when habit becomes ritual? It’s like pressing the button on a camera: first you frame the shot, then you focus, then – almost without your expecting it – the shutter opens and the effulgence is etched onto digital sensors, where it will reside forever… or as forever as we can possibly make anything in the neural network, where all our images and imaginings truly reside.

I can’t re-conjure the precise moment when I decided to make the bed with Cerberus lying on top of the tussled blankets and sheets, but there must have been a tipping point when that morning rite was sanctified, became official, obligatory, so fixed that Cerby won’t get up now until we’ve done our thing.

As for Mel, she doesn’t think it’s funny anymore. If she thinks about it at all it’s with annoyance.

There’s a trick to making the bed with your dog lying on it. Psychically, you have to place the canine at the very centre of the activity… think of her weight, depressing the mattress, as the locus of gravity in your suburban universe. Then you have to animate that gravity with consciousness – sanctify it as more than a mindless force, pulling everything downward, bending the universe toward a dark place from which nothing, not even an essence as ephemeral as light, can escape.

You have to imagine the warp as part of a continuum, like the yellow centre of a daisy, that holds the petals in place and draws your picture together in time and space… but with petals that aren’t sharply defined, that bleed into infinity by imperceptible gradations of awareness… memories shading off, one into another.

What is memory, after all, if not the whole of our past and entirety of our future, the infinitely large and small coalescing in the exact epicenter of mind? Once you’ve got that right, you tug, and smooth, and straighten, and – magically – everything works out… the bed gets made and the dog’s still lying there on top of the coverlet when you’re finished.

Mel and I used to share the bed-making duties. Some days she’d do it, some days me, sometimes we’d each take a side and work together. I suppose if we’d continued in that vein, Cerby would never have become so central to the process. Melanie wouldn’t have allowed it.

“It’s ridiculous,” she says. “The dog shouldn’t even be on the bed in the first place.” But she leaves it at that, lets the sleeping dog lie, while she busies herself getting ready for work on weekdays… for shopping, gardening, visiting friends and relations, or whatever on weekends and holidays. With Mel, there’s a ‘look’ for every occasion, and she’s meticulous about getting things just so. I’m sure people think her a bit too elegantly coiffed and dressed, but they don’t understand how hard it is for her to hold things together without breaking down, flinging papers about, smashing dishes.

Some days, when I remember, I compliment her on how good she looks. She appreciates that. If we didn’t have a past, it would be like flirting again and falling in love. “Beautiful” describes her best, but I have trouble using that word – it makes me feel unworthy, like I’m complimenting a goddess, who can see right through me.