This week we bring you a new work of short fiction . . . ECLIPSED

THE NEWSPAPER HAD predicted a partial eclipse of the moon for the Sunday night before Labour Day. Though his parents sometimes had reservations about allowing their children to have too much fun on Sundays, Nigel Mawson surmounted such half-baked scruples with surprising ease by stressing the educational value of being allowed to sleep out with Little Loss and Stu on the evening of such a rare and instructive occurrence. “I’ll probably be in my twenties before there’s another one of these,” he told his mother. “And in grade seven science we’ll be studying the solar system.”

LONDON, ONTARIO – The American short story writer and novelist, Flannery O’Connor (1925-64), was always ready to joke about her Catholic faith and the apparently crazy things it drew out of her and made her do. She knew there were times others bristled at the depths of her convictions, and would attempt to head them off at the pass, proclaiming, "You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd." But she wasn’t prepared to soft-pedal (let alone deny) her faith for the sake of keeping any social exchange pleasant; not even one that could advance her literary career if she played her conversational cards diplomatically. Her epistolary account of how she stunk out the joint at a salon-type evening at Mary McCarthy’s is one of the highlights of her collected letters, entitled, The Habit of Being:

LONDON, ONTARIO – Recurring dreams are funny things. Sometimes I wake up reflecting on a dream which I believe to have been a repeated phantasy, yet when I think about it again several hours later, I realize that’s not so; that its flavour of reiteration, so convincing at the time of its unfolding, was artificially baked in and was in fact not true; that this was actually a one-off. I believe I could identify about a dozen dreams that are actually repeaters. While some details will certainly change each time out, the broad outlines of those repeating dreams numbingly remain the same. 

LONDON, ONTARIO – Events have conspired these last few hunkered-down weeks to make me reflect on a considerably shorter term of quarantine which I endured at the age of twenty-two.

I have lightly tweaked this forty-six year-old essay about my stay in the old Middlesex County Jail in the last year of its operations.