I walk in the mornings through field and forest and on cliffs above the lake and deciding if it’s too muddy to go down the big hill successfully is where my first stint with optimism comes in if you don’t count that I already looked in the mirror and am still alive.

I usually think it’ll be fine so long as I avoid the shiny bits and just so you’ll get the scope of things it’s a wet April and a wide hill, steep and long, with a couple of visible-for-now paths where it evens out so you’re kind of on a stage there although it’s usually too early for an audience when we go unless you count Daisy whose shoulders I see shaking and she tries to pretend her wild toothy smile is actually a grimace or even a gag but I don’t buy it.

Just because I’m an optimist doesn’t mean I’m stupid. Usually

So I’ve got a whole book of short stories (25) ready to go, all typographered out and designed with little stamp-sized illustrations at the beginning of each story. Already sent it to Toronto’s Coach House Books because I have a soft spot with them since they published the first book my late friend ASA Harrison wrote when we were side-by-side typographers on the late shift and that’s when you really get to know somebody. We had a secret Jack Daniels society with extremely exclusive membership and beer hidden in the ceiling tiles and she was working with Coach House at the time and I was in on everything so I thought it would be nice if they published me, too, and if that’s not a slightly unhinged optimist-induced statement neither is this:

I sent a story to The New Yorker called Lilac Skies and My Sit-Com Life to The Atlantic and also am thinking thin for summer

There’s so much hope going in so many directions that rejection is just a sort of by-product, you know, and I don’t give a hoot. I mean I write for the way it makes me feel and for the way I’m trying to make you feel.

And the other thing is there’s a very new very interesting website/app called novellea.com and you can post stories on it and get paid according to the number of likes you receive. I posted my first story the day before the monthly payout and I don’t know much about foreign currency but I’m pretty sure I am rich now because look

And as always if you feel like a story, here you go, and if you don’t, here you don’t go:

Our Sketchy Sister Sam

My twin brother Clem had a club foot but could climb like you wouldn’t believe. He’d swoop up trees like we were on the moon and if a ball went on the roof, any roof, he’d bound up the side of the building like a soccer field and next thing you know an entire galaxy of balls, one or two of them the superball kind, and he’d holler scrambles! which I was already doing like a multi-armed cartoon.

We were born before we were done if you know what I mean and we are not like you which you might think is risky to say because how would I know but I do. I know. We all do.

I was the opposite of Clem and could fold myself into nothing and get completely flattened by gravity like I had a double helping and sideways bones. Clem would unfurl me sometimes and take me with him and off we’d go decades before parkour and about the same time as the Superman comics our sister Sketchy Sam collected let’s just say, although Denny down the street who was in love with her in a desperate kind of way would later, when he came out of it, swear she stole from him.

It was Sam’s job she said to get things into the rectangular cells she magic markered in the cheap Woolworths scrapbooks at first until all the babysitting money and she insisted my mother take her to the mall in the city, the proper art store, where she bought the thick white kind of paper and superior pencils, pale erasers that didn’t leave a wake, metal sharpeners with two holes, all of which she carefully placed into a new pencil case with a roll up lid like the desk in the den and she started drawing for real then, mostly me and Clem at first anyway, Clem scraping the ceiling and me flat except for two eyes on the floor is how she drew us and I don’t know how she did it but those squiggles were portraits, true as life, just like us.

We called her Sketch and she was the most sought after babysitter ever there was. Parents booked her months in advance, gigs for which she asked double pay at first until she rounded it all the way up to twenty dollars a night when her friends were making three dollars fifty cents with tip. She got pizza out of the deal, too, and called me and Clem when it arrived so we’d fly over for a piece which the parents knew about and the kids seemed to like.

There was a no-piggy-backing policy in effect so the kids would have to stand on Clem’s shoulders for the tree-climb and keep it secret.

At the end of the night Sketch would leave cells on the refrigerator, one for each kid, beautiful things indeed, the children transformed into superheroes with names like Mary Muscle, Suzy Smartly, Danny Divine, Mighty Mike and the kids could hardly wait for a sequel which parents were known to cough up big money for as birthday presents and/or high-mark incentives.

Usually I have to write an entire story in one sitting else the characters no matter how much I love them are just names when I come back but this time – and I’ve had a shower, more coffee which is mostly not conducive to storytelling, and I’ve taken the dog down the street said hello to a few neighbours which usually knocks the stories right out of me – but they’re still here Clem and Bobby and Sketchy Sam and I suppose it’s because they’re safe in the cells. Preserved in a way.

Not sure how many years have passed but me and Clem are still here, still horsing around like we do, maybe one normal person between us. We share a job at Tim Horton’s although we never say would you like a donut with that or would you like a beverage but instead we find saying howboutaooki-e-e-e-e? after a short silence works because they almost always say yes!please! like you’re giving it away for free.

Sketch ended up going to art school in the city and me and Clem moved into a building when our parents had enough of us which we totally understood and were mutual about.

In her third year Sketch got so much money for her work she was able to buy a beautiful old three storey apartment building on Gladstone Avenue downtown Toronto. She rented most of it out but me and Clem helped her turn the entire upstairs into one big studio apartment for her. We opened the whole thing up except for two rooms side by side along the back wall and the next time we came to visit, on one of the doors was a cell with my weird portrait, and on the second door was a cell with Clem, or at least his flying essence.

Inside it was just one room so the doors were a sort of trick and there were two matching beds side by side, two dressers, two desks and a big leather couch in front of a TV on the wall. The rest of the walls, all of them, were covered in framed cells Sketch had done from when we were all little to now, eyeballs and squiggles mostly but not all, and that was when me and Clem stopped working weekends and every Saturday morning we’d hop on the train to meet Sketch at Union Station, a four hour ride, and I used to wonder what we looked like to the cars stopped at the crossing, you know, my excited face and Clem’s, too, through the window true as life and just like Sketch drew us.