Tag: fantasy

(from ‘Tales from the Escarpment – or Nearby’ – release date May 1 2026)

Franklin gazed out the window of his bookshop on St. Paul’s Street and rued the snow. It was lovely, no doubt, but so, so bad for business. Especially today, when a book-signing by an unknown but exciting (he hoped!) local author had been booked and now looked to be a bust. She had phoned from her kitchen in the village of St. David’s to report being snowed-in, marooned, in fact, until someone could come from Niagara-on-the-Lake with a pickup-cum-snowplow to free her.

She went by the name Lola Smuts. He had never met the woman – she had dropped by with a box of self-published books on a day he had been off to Great Wolf Lodge for a weekend with his twins – on ‘his’ weekends he always did something special with them, something that made them eager, he hoped, to hang out with Dad. He figured it would work at least until puberty. After that, other weekend dads had told him, all bets were off.

So, no, he’d never met the author, but he’d pulled one of her novels out of the box on a slow day and read it cover to cover, entranced by her powerful prose and titillated by the smoking sensuality of her sex scenes. They were raw, and unusually honest. This was no average romance novel: he quite enjoyed it. Lola Smuts had to be a nom de plume.

Afterwards, he’d emailed her and they’d made arrangements for today, for her to come in and occupy a table stacked with her novels, to chat with customers. Hopefully, some of them would leave with autographed purchases. Franklin would be her patron, in a way, first to introduce her to his customers, a group of people with eclectic tastes in literature, and influential in and of themselves. At least, they considered themselves influencers. Locally, that is. 

Now, thanks to a polar vortex from the Arctic, everything had come to a halt. Most commercial activity in downtown St. Catharines had stopped entirely, so Franklin had a long boring day ahead. He felt somewhat bitter toward the warming oceans that had a hand in creating these polar events. A philosophical man, a reader and thinker by nature and by choice, he realized his little concerns in the sphere he occupied and influenced were as naught in the big picture, but, hey! he resented missing out on an opportunity to meet an intriguing woman. Had he asked, she might even have read some of those steamy passages out loud.

He circumnavigated his shop, turning off unnecessary lights, turning down the heat. He left the illuminated ‘Open’ sign on, hoping a stalwart walker might be enticed to drop in to find a book to wile away the silent, snowy hours before the slow-moving weather system moved east to paralyze waiting Quebec. He turned on the Keurig in the small office at the back of the shop. Anyone foolhardy enough to venture downtown today deserved a coffee for their efforts.

He made one for himself. He lightened it with lactose-free cream from the tiny fridge that sat like a portly squat snowman on the folding table that took up the entire back wall of the office. He dug through the drawers of his Ikea desk (a gift from his parents the day he signed the lease on the shop) to find a baggy of sweetener packets and dropped two into his mug and stirred it with a grotty teaspoon caked at its edges with something or other.

As he slurped, he heard the tinkle of the tiny brass bell attached to the door. He headed for the front of the shop to greet and orient his visitor. He arrived in time to see his visitor slam and lock the door, flick off the ‘Open’ sign and pull down the old-fashioned roller blinds to effectively cover the front windows. The visitor ran past him, exuding frigid air, and darted into the office. Muttering ’What the fuck?” Franklin chased after him and cornered him inside the office, closing the door behind them and standing before the door, blocking his escape.

He looked the man over and recognition dawned quickly. This man was a street person, a frequent dropper-inner, to browse and never buy, to escape from the heat or the rain or the cold or the cops. He was usually, but not always, calm and coherent. Franklin knew him as Otto.

“What’s up, Otto?” Franklin asked. “What’s the panic?”

Otto was shivering. Ice that had formed in his beard and luxuriant eyebrows began to melt, along with the snow he had brought in on his shabby, laceless boots. He stood in a puddle and shook.

“My shop was open for business, Otto. Was there a good reason for locking up?”

Otto stared with longing at the coffee maker. “That smells some good, Frankie”, he said, nodding at the mug in Franklin’s hand. He smiled a semi-toothless grin. “Wouldn’t mind one of those myself.”

“Take your coat off and hang it on the chair, there. Let it dry, Otto. I’ll turn the heat up.” Franklin loaded a pod into the machine. He already knew how Otto liked his coffee – he’d been a frequent imbiber over the years that Franklin had been in business on St. Paul’s Street. He fixed the coffee with three cream and two sugar and handed it to Otto who grasped it in both hands and blew upon it before cautiously sipping it.

“Otto. Feeling better?” Franklin asked softly.

Otto nodded, a shy smile on his face. He swiped the melted snow off his face with a damp sleeve. Franklin pulled a few paper towels off a roll beside the squat fridge and handed them over. Otto wiped his face, then blew his nose into the damp towels. Franklin took the towels from his outstretched hand and deposited them in a bin under the desk.

“Now, Otto, if you please, tell me why you locked down my business?” Franklin wondered if today would be one of Otto’s lucid days, or one of the others.

“Gotta keep them out. Jesus, Frankie, they’re pullin’ people off the streets. Sendin’ them to concentration camps in Texas.” Otto’s hands had started to shake. Franklin took the mug from Otto’s hand, put it on the desk.

“You’ve been watching the news, Otto?”

“Lori shows me stuff on her phone. Just a matter of time, she said. They’re here, Frankie! I saw them.”

“Are you hungry, Otto?” Franklin asked, reaching into the fridge for the wrapped veggie sub he’d brought from home for lunch today. “Eat this and you’ll probably feel better.”

“I fuckin’ SAW ‘em. Don’t try to tell me I didn’t. Don’t believe me, just go peek out the window. Don’t let ‘em see you, though. They’ll come right the fuck through your door to get at ya.”

“What you saw on Lori’s phone, Otto? That’s going on in Minnesota. That’s the United States. Not Canada. Nobody’s getting hauled off the streets and sent to concentration camps in St. Catharines, Otto, so don’t be scared, ok? You’re fine, you’re safe. It’s ok for me to unlock the door. Nothing bad will happen.”

Otto stared at Franklin, mouth agape, a long sliver of green pepper hanging from his lower lip. “Don’t be stupid, Frankie. Border means nothin’ to them. Animals, is what they are. Thugs. Louts. Incipient psychopaths.”

Franklin was stunned. Otto sometimes did that – stunned him silent with words that Franklin would never have suspected him of owning. Or with interest in a book that Franklin would not have thought he’d the brainpower to tackle. After one such event, he had asked Otto where he’d gone to school. Otto had asked “post-secondary or post-graduate?” At Franklin’s surprised silence, he’d grinned and pocketed the paperback he’d been reading. He’d winked and walked, laughing, out of the shop.

“What exactly did you see?” Franklin wanted to know. He had to believe that Otto had seen SOMETHING. He didn’t seem to be in a drug-induced mania – he’d seen that before, and this, whatever it was, was different. Dehydration and low blood sugar, on the other hand had been known to play havoc with Otto’s powers of perception. Franklin decided to let the coffee and veggie sub do their magic.

“They’re shootin’ people in the street, bro.” Otto sounded sad. “You a student of history, Frankie? I was. Lived a lot of it, too. Makes me sad. People refuse to recognize what’s going on. Could it be they don’t teach history in America any more?”

“I don’t know, Otto. But we teach it here. And a border is a border.” Franklin replied. “Now how are you feeling? Any better?”

“Better. Thanks. Let’s have a look and see what they’re up to. Maybe they’re moved on down Queenston Street, or Niagara. We should warn people, Frankie, don’t you think?”

“How? Call the police? You really want to talk to police? Last time, you ended up in Psychiatric Care, as I recall.”

Franklin walked to the front door, opened it and stuck his head out, swiveling right and left to take in as much of St. Paul’s Street as he could before his vision was obscured by the heavy wet blowing snow. Otto had followed him out of the office, shrugging himself into his battered coat, but he stopped short when the door opened and he cringed. “What the fuck, Frankie?”

“Come here, Otto. Come look. Nobody’s out there. We’re fine.” Franklin gestured for Otto to join him in the open doorway. “Really. There’s no one. Except that guy.” Franklin pointed towards a parking lot a few doors down where Otto’s some-time partner in crime Davey could be seen climbing into a dumpster.

“That’s just Davey. Wonder if there’s room in there for me? Food and shelter in one fell swoop.” Otto chuckled.

“Jesus, Otto. Go get him. I’ll order pizza. Those guys deliver in any weather.”

Otto had fetched Davey from the dumpster and they were making their way through snow drifts back to the bookshop when a large white machine, loudly whining in low gear, rounded the corner. Snow covered most of the windshield, leaving only an impression of goggle-covered eyes and large bodies within. Otto screamed and grabbed Davey by the arm, tugging and dragging him the last few feet to the store. He flung the door open, forced them both through then slammed it shut behind them and locked it. He dropped to a squat and lunged away from the front of the store. Totally confused, Davey followed Otto into the stacks, scooted on his knees when Otto scooted, squatted and cowered where Otto squatted and cowered. All the while, something between a whine and a moan issued from Otto’s mouth.

The white machine pulled up and stopped in front of the bookstore. Franklin unlocked the door once again and opened it, looked out. The machine sat motionless, ticked and steamed. It shed lumps and chunks of ice and gradually became less than menacing. He looked on, bemused, while one very tall person in a full-body snowsuit climbed down from the cab of what was revealing itself to be a white Ram truck kitted out with a snow-plow blade on the front. The vision in the snowsuit removed a balaclava, smiled and shook out her long golden blond hair.

“I’m here for my book-signing,” said Lola Smuts.

The End