– Fiction by Helen Orr –
Featured in Issue 21 of Dreamers Magazine.
El’s house, like her, sat on the fringes of a polite community.
Where the town ended and the fields began, a few houses, including El’s, barely remembered how to belong. El watched the kids who lived in fenced yards with pools and competing gardens from her yard on a street they couldn’t even name. There was no reason for such tame children to seek what lay on the other side of the traffic lights. This was her side of the highway, where the yards forgot to stay inside any lines and scattered, undisciplined, into the farmer’s fields behind them.
Cassie and El had been on their own for a while. Now that she was eight, El knew Cassie was younger than most moms. El would always ask kids in her class how old their parents were, just so she could tell them Cassie was twenty-three. She especially liked to do it when she could watch the moms’ expressions when they did the math and realized how much older they were than Cassie. Her friend Sharon had a sister who was twenty-five. And El was tall for grade three. She and Cassie could easily pass for sisters.
When the streetlights came on, the kids went indoors and the neighbourhood calmed. Nighttime had become El’s favourite time of day, when she could shut her eyes and listen to stories woven by Jesse, Cassie’s newest boyfriend. Not since El was in kindergarten had one of the boyfriends moved in with them. He was an excellent storyteller. El admired how he could make stuff up.
“You should write them down, Jess,” Cassie told him. But El liked how he told them out of his head, just for her. Like magic. Writing would make the words stiff and dead, lying flat on the page for anyone to read. He told cool adventures about Gossedel the Wily, which El knew was her.
Hidden in the woods out back, a camper top they called Wildel had become Gossedel’s castle. The fields behind their house ended at a creek where El would go to look for tadpoles in the spring. Beyond the creek, an abandoned apple orchard turned into a shaggy wood, where undergrowth grew up tangled with new life and hung with the vestiges of last season’s discards.
El, Cassie, and Jesse had discovered the camper there in September, when Jesse had come over for the first time. They had gone out to build El a fort in the woods behind the house. There was no TV, so entertainment was always of the “old fashioned” kind, as Cassie said. They walked the plank across the creek and discovered an old tree with good apples. “How serendipitous,” said Cassie in a fake snooty accent, a new word for El. They brought all the apples they could carry back to the house to make sauce. You couldn’t bring them to school because the other kids would see that they had worm holes.
Now, bedtime was full of stories that took place in Wildel. When Jesse stalled in a story, she opened her eyes to find Jesse’s closed, his hands folded comfortably across his chest as he lay on the floor, his feet propped up on the end of the bed she’d inherited when he’d moved in. The bare light bulb in the hallway leaked a golden glow around the edges of her door that never closed all the way, haloing it like it was the portal to another dimension. She’d give Jesse’s foot a nudge with her own.
“Keep going,” she’d say. And Jesse would oblige.
There was chaos near Wildel. People were running towards the banks of Bottomless Creek like chickens with their heads cut off, wailing and shaking their fists.
Jesse shook his fist in the air and El did the same.
An evil pirate captain, with flowing golden hair, in full body armour, stood on an upside-down shopping cart half in the water. Pirates were sea-dooing in the creek around him.
El had seen the shopping cart when she’d been down at the creek just that day, amongst other unwanted things people had tossed there.
The pirate leader pointed at the people running towards him. “Your children are hostages in my secret lair. The key hides in the shadow of Wildel. If you want to cross Bottomless Creek to find it, you’ll have to answer my riddle or I’ll make all your children pirates for life! I need some fresh blood in my crew.” The pirates cheered and the parents wailed.
Gossedel was standing in the crowd. She pulled off her hoodie.
Jesse got a spit gob ready in his throat.
Gossedel showed the pirate tyrant she wasn’t afraid by hawking a big one on the ground.
“Gross,” said El.
“She used a hanky to wipe her lips,” added Jesse.
El giggled and pretended to spit too. “Go on.”
I am Gossedel the Wily. Ask me a riddle and I’ll answer before you can dry your hair.
El touched her damp hair. She had regular arguments with her mom about when to comb it. She thought of other girls in her class, like Jasmin, whose shiny, perfect hair was always combed and held back with sparkly unicorn barrettes. She wondered if Jasmin might like to see Wildel.
The camper top itself had one small window on its side and a hatch El could crawl into rather than using the door at the back. Jesse had found some extra spray cans of paint where he worked and written Wildel in curly letters across the outside. Cassie sprayed some stars around the name, then added the letter C for Cassie in the shape of a foggy-edged moon. She linked the moon with a chain of hearts to the letters J for Jesse and L for El to form an anchor in the bottom corner. El was sure Jasmin would be impressed.
Pirates always want to be the loudest person around. And they always have to be right.
This made her think of Angela Fink, at school. She didn’t want to think about her and she shouldn’t let her mind wander. She might fall asleep before the story was over. Jesse always said he couldn’t tell the same story again. “Life only happens once,” he’d tell her, “and stories are never the same the second time.
“Here’s the riddle,” bellowed the Pirate. The parents held their hands under their chins like they were praying. “You carry it everywhere you go, and it weighs nothing. What is it?”
“A feather,” said El, before Jesse could say.
“Good answer,” said Jesse. He paused too long and El sat up on her elbow and looked over the bed at him. He opened one eye, returning her look, and she lay back down.
The Pirate leader yelled, “Not the answer written upside down on the bottom of the riddle book page! So, wrong! The answer is YOUR NAME. A thing that you carry with you and weighs nothing is your name!”
“Ha,” said Gossedel. “I have given you two right answers. Gossedel the Wily and a feather. There’s always more than one right answer!”
El smiled. Jesse was definitely right for them. He made them more of a family than when it was just her and her mom.
At school, El was an outsider. They’d only moved into this house at the beginning of the grade three school year. She’d tried playing with Jasmin’s group at recess. Everyone wanted to be Jasmin’s friend. Angela Fink told El that she and Jasmin had been friends since kindergarten and that Jasmin’s mom did not want El to play with their “group.” Sharon agreed.
They were jealous, that was what her mom told her. Of what, she wasn’t sure.
Things were better at home with Jesse around. In November, her mom told her she’d be getting a little brother. El thought she was talking about Jesse. Cassie had also told her men didn’t finish growing until their twenties, and Jesse was only nineteen. Christmas was coming and El figured Jesse was as good a present as anything.
In December they received a Christmas turkey from the Helping Hands Food Finders. The scrawny turkey neck inside the cave of the giant bird had surprised her. Turkeys looked much bigger with all their feathers on. Jesse must be skinnier than she thought, inside his fluorescent work jacket and mechanic’s jumpsuit.
“Helping Hands Food Finders sounds like a shoplifters union,” said Jesse.
“HHFF, Ha-Ha Frickin’ Fabulous,” said Cassie. “I wish the oven worked.”
That’s when they’d taken the city bus to the grocery store and bought a big bag of charcoal and some tinfoil. They buried that sucker up to his neckless hole in red-hot coals out by Wildel, so people couldn’t see from the road.
“If anyone sees us with shovels in one hand and plates in the other, the smell of succulent burning flesh, outside in the middle of winter, they’ll know we’re cannibals,” said Jesse.
“Doo, doo, doo, doo,” sang Cassie, and said in her spooky announcer voice, “Strangely, the HHFF people have all disappeared.”
“They probably died of old age,” said El. She had seen that the free Christmas turkey delivery was made by people with grey hair.
When the sky turned from stark winter light to chilling shadowed dusk, they went back out to check on the underground Christmas dinner. They stood around their glowing outdoor furnace, blowing clouds of breath like they were its chimneys.
“If I drink, I die. If I eat, I am fine. What am I?” asked Jesse.
“Easy,” said El, staring into the coals. “Fire.”
“So smart,” said Cassie.
Jesse and her mom always made her feel smart. Jesse wasn’t big like other kids’ dads, not that she thought of him as that. He was just Jesse. But he could train Gossedel to thigh-grip her way up an ironwood tree to harness lightning that would fry the golden-haired pirate to a pulsing black and red pulp. That was so much better than Constable Carson, in his overstuffed vest, who came into school to train the safety patrollers on how to say “stop” and “go” and to report unsafe or disrespectful behaviour. Unlike safety patrollers, Gossedel didn’t have to get up early to save the world.
Her mom didn’t feel so good in the mornings these days. El had figured out that the brother she was getting wasn’t Jesse after all. Many days, El kept her eyes on the ground as Cassie walked her into school, so she would not see the secretary shaking her head at their late arrival.
In January, Sharon’s older sister started picking El up on her early morning safety patroller days. Sharon had a hissy-fit if her patrol partner was even five minutes late. El was pretty happy to step into a car for the ten minutes it took to drive to school, a good thirty-minute walk in her snowpants and heavy winter boots. She was used to walking, but Cassie always bought a size or so too big from Value Village. El didn’t mind because, Jesse reminded her, Gossedel needed to be in disguise, like Superman with his glasses as Clark Kent.
El had used this superpower analogy when she found Tony Romero, from her class, crying by the coat rack after Christmas. His mother had made him wear strings on his new glasses and Angela Fink had told him they were called “idiot strings.” El reminded him that Angela’s name was Fink and she would probably always have to live up to that, and that Superman would have got strings for his glasses too if he’d thought of it, to make his disguise better.
Not long after that, Angela had noticed that there was a name on the inside of El’s snowpants. The teachers were always sending home notes about labeling clothing as the lost and found overflowed. The name in El’s snowpants was that of someone in grade six at the school.
Angela said, “Ew, you get your clothes second-hand or you stole them.”
El pretended not to care but she noticed how Angela, Sharon, and some of the other girls looked her up and down when she came into class each morning to see if they could detect any signs of second-handness.
In February, Jasmin and El were partnered up for a writing activity. Angela Fink always made a face if she had to work with El. The other girls would giggle and point at Angela’s bad luck until El stared them down. Then they’d look at something on their desk and pretend to be afraid of her at recess later. El loved it when she got to work with Jasmin. Jasmin listened to her and didn’t just take over whatever activity was going on. This was her chance to tell Jasmin about Wildel.
“I have a fort out back at my place, called Wildel,” said El. “You should come and see it. We could make our story there.”
“How old is your mom? Is Jesse your dad?” Jasmin had asked.
El thought of Gossedel. Riddles are tricky questions. Be careful when answering them. El suspected that Jasmin wasn’t interested in being friends as much as she was interested in being a spy for the other girls and in staying
popular.
“My mom had me really young. Jesse’s her boyfriend. He’s really cool.”
Jasmin was planning to have a Valentine’s party and El half-hoped and was half-afraid of being invited along with all the other girls. She’d have to ask Jasmin to come over after school one day if there was any chance of being invited to the party. There was lots of time before Valentine’s still, so if Jasmin invited her, it would look normal, like they were friends.
When El told her mom that Jasmin had said yes to coming over, Cassie looked surprised. They worked on making Wildel as inviting as possible. They stored blankets in the camper and retrieved sticks for a bonfire they could have when it got dark. It got dark early in January.
The day before the planned visit, Jesse and Cassie were in the kitchen making special snacks. El overheard Cassie say to Jesse, “I just want her to have friends.”
Jesse said, “Yeah, I know. But sometimes kids aren’t friends.”
El peeked around the corner of the kitchen and saw Cassie nod. She loved them for helping but hated them for saying what she feared.
She walked in and said, “Everybody likes Rice Krispies squares.”
Jasmin’s mom had said Jasmin could go if Sharon was invited too.
On Friday, Jasmin’s mother picked up Jasmin, Sharon, and El from school and drove them to El’s house. She had a nicer car than Sharon’s sister. This car was sleek and black and clean, clean, clean, like no one actually sat in it. A song about a “Skater Boy and a Ballerina” came on the radio. Jasmin and Sharon knew all the words to the chorus and sang along. El didn’t know the words, so she pretended to be the kid skateboarding and falling onto Jasmin’s lap as they sat on the bench in the back seat. Jasmin’s mother said she didn’t think this was a good song, but she didn’t turn off the radio and smiled anyway. El wondered about this. It made her seem nice. As soft as her puffy down coat. If Cassie didn’t like a song, she’d say it was crap, turn it off, and tell El, “Don’t let the radio station tell you what to listen to.”
When they pulled up, El looked at the broken eavestrough dangling down the faded siding and at the crumbling front steps. The railing leaned against the wall. The driveway wasn’t shovelled. Jasmin’s mom parked in the road to walk the girls up to the house to meet El’s mom. She didn’t say anything about the house, but El could tell what she was thinking, the way she was staring.
It was a good thing none of them had x-ray vision. Inside was way worse. The wood nailed across the broken window upstairs was covered with cardboard on the inside. They were planning to fix it up better in the spring. She pointed at the window she knew they were looking at and said, “We were playing baseball in the yard.”
“In winter?” said Jasmin.
El did a big windup and pitch with a snowball. “Spring training.”
Cassie wasn’t in the house when El poked her head around the front door and yelled, “We’re here!” When there was no answer, El closed the front door again and walked around the side of the house, leaving the little bunch of guests huddled together at the bottom of the front steps. Jasmin’s mother looked like she wanted to bundle Jasmin and Sharon back into the car. Just then, Cassie came running across the field, pulling an old toboggan.
“Mom!” yelled El.
“Your snacks are in the bag,” Cassie said, rosy-cheeked and winded from plowing through the fresh dump of snow that had filled in their usual path out to Wildel. She handed the frayed rope to El and pointed at the plastic grocery bag tucked into the front of the toboggan.
“I’m Cassie,” she nodded to Jasmin’s mom, who was staring at her. “We’ve got a girl’s fort out back. Rice Krispies squares.” She pointed at the bag again.
Smart, thought El. No spies inside the house.
“Show your friends around,” Cassie invited, waving her arm at the field like she was Queen of a mansion, giving everyone her widest smile.
The girls trudged across the field to the woods, towing the toboggan.
Jasmin’s mother called after them, “Your dad will pick you up at six o’clock, sharp.”
El showed Jasmin and Sharon the way to Wildel, across the frozen creek and into the shaggy woods. The fort was hidden behind a pink shower curtain and a blanket strung between the trees.
Jesse’s voice came from behind the curtain. “In order to enter Wildel, you must prove you are friends of Gossedel.”
“I am Gossedel,” said El, indignant.
“Prove it, prooove it, proooove it,” came Jesse’s voice, like he’d swallowed an echo.
“Who is that?” whispered Sharon.
El gave a thumbs-up to the terrified Sharon. “I am Gossedel the Wily, ruler of Wildel. Ask me a riddle and I will prove we belong.”
Jasmin had her arms crossed, but her body was half-turned for escape. Hedging her bets, Cassie would say.
“Alive without breath, as cold as death; never thirsty, ever drinking, all in mail, never clinking,” Jesse’s voice was like Gollum’s.
El, Jesse, and Cassie had watched the DVD of The Lord of the Rings on the portable player one of Jesse’s friends at work lent him. Gollum’s riddle was fresh in her mind. “A fish!” said Gossedel.
A gloved hand poked through the shower-curtain screen. Jesse’s yellow work glove, now spray-painted silver, held a cape made of all the Value Village scarves they’d collected for Hallowe’en and scarf-dancing. El grabbed it and draped it around her shoulders. She held open the curtain and said, “Enter friends of Wildel.”
Jasmin leaned forward to have a look but stayed behind Sharon’s shoulder.
There was no one there. Jesse had ducked out of sight before they opened the curtain. El could see a little smoke coming from the bonfire pit behind the camper. As soon as she saw the wisps of smoke, she smelled it. There must have been some cedar branches burning because an explosive crackle from the hidden bonfire made Jasmin and Sharon jump. They quickly walked between the curtains and stood closer to El than they ever had at school. Their closeness made her feel protective and powerful. Wildel’s painted side stood before them looking beautiful with the shadow of the bare tree branches adding a pattern of grey and sunlight over the moon, anchor, stars, and lettering.
“Enter,” said Gossedel, pushing open the trailer hatch. She wriggled inside then stuck her arm out. “Magic potion treats,” she called.
Jasmin figured it out and pulled the sack of Rice Krispies squares off the toboggan and handed them to Gossedel’s disembodied arm.
Once inside, they sat close together on the floor. El handed out the snacks. Then she pulled out the sleeping bags so they could bundle up.
Sharon said, “It’s kind of dark in here.”
Gossedel said, “If you eat your magic potion treat, the lights will brighten and you will feel warmer, as if we had a magic bonfire.”
Jasmin pulled a square out of the grocery bag and bit into the squishy treat. As she did, El snapped the blind on the window up with a sudden flourish. The rippling metallic clatter and bang made Sharon scream and scramble to get out the low hatch. Her boot punctuated her exit by hitting El right on the nose.
Weak afternoon light filtered into the trailer from the open hatch. A warm trickle of blood ran over El’s top lip and her eyes watered. She couldn’t be mad at Sharon for being scared and she didn’t want anything to ruin their visit.
“You have a nosebleed,” said Jasmin, munching. She obviously had no idea how much a boot in the nose hurt.
El stuck her head out the hatch and said to the back of Sharon’s crying snowsuit, “Sharon, come on back.”
Jesse and Cassie came running from around the back of the trailer. They’d been keeping the bonfire going for when the girls came out.
“I wanna go home!” cried Sharon.
Jasmin squeezed her head out the hatch beside El. “Crybaby,” she whispered in El’s ear.
“It’s okay, Sharon,” called El. “The magic potion squares will protect you.”
El pulled her head inside again so she could turn around and climb out, followed by Jasmin.
“What happened to your nose?” asked Cassie when she saw her. She took a close look but the bleeding had stopped. “Jesse’s built a bonfire and I brought some bread to toast. Anyone allergic to peanut-butter?”
Sharon started to cry harder.
“She has an epi-pen,” said Jasmin.
“Never mind,” said Cassie. “We can have Cheez Whiz.”
“Everyone find a long stick,” said Jesse. He was stirring the bonfire he’d built right over the pit where they’d cooked the Christmas turkey.
“Is that a bone?” asked Jasmin, staring at the fire pit and lifting her toast away from the flames.
“Gossedel requires sacrifices sometimes,” said El.
Sharon’s crying made her gag.
“I think it’s almost time we headed back,” said Cassie.
Sharon scrambled towards the path.
“Wait!” yelled El and chased after her.
Sharon screamed and started running. Jasmin ran after them. “Stop!”
Sharon face-planted in the snow then raised her head, crying even harder. Jasmin caught up.
“Let’s make snow angels,” said Jasmin.
“I don’t want to be an angel!” sobbed Sharon. “I don’t want to be a sacrifice.”
They were still on the path, halfway between Wildel and the house, when Constable Carson came to meet them. He was Jasmin’s dad. El had forgotten that.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Nothing, Dad,” said Jasmin.
El stared at Constable Carson’s regular clothing. People looked so different underneath their work disguises, like the scrawny turkey without its feathers.
“Sharon fell and thinks this game we were playing was real,” said Jasmin.
El handed Sharon her Rice Krispies square. “Take it home for later,” she said.
Cassie and Jesse slogged up, pulling the toboggan, loaded up with shower curtain and blankets.
“Sorry,” said Cassie. “We were just putting out the fire.”
“Fire?” said Constable Carson.
“Just a bonfire,” said Jesse. He stuck his hand out and said, “I’m Jesse.”
“Nice to meet you.” He shook Jesse’s hand.
El couldn’t believe how well everything had gone.
“You want to come to my Valentine’s party?” Jasmin asked El, before she got in the car.
“Sure,” said El.
“Wildel is cool. My party’s just going to be in my basement.”
About the Author – Helen Orr
Helen Orr has a Creative Writing Certificate from the University of Toronto. In a former life she taught French and was a school Principal. Now, she is a writer of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Her children’s book, Belinda and the Fairy Lair was published in 2024 by Nightingale Books, an imprint of Pegasus publishers. Books 2 and 3 in the series are in production. Her article “Weekend Warriors on the Bruce Trail” can be found in Boomer magazine. Recently, her short story “The Communications Officer is Silenced” appeared on Little Old Lady comedy blog. Two of her short stories were awarded Honourable Mentions: “Life As We Know It” from Glimmer Train and “Sunshine on a Cloudy Day” by the Stratford Writer’s Festival. Helen currently resides in Stratford with her husband.
Meanwhile, at Dreamers…
Fireside Writing Retreat
It’s simple; a set of prompts, a loose structure, and time set aside to move through it at your own pace. You can follow it closely or not at all. There’s no expectation to produce anything finished.
Dreamers Writing Farm
Dreamers Writing Farm is the physical home of the Dreamers community, a quiet, creative space on the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario. Writers, artists, and travellers stay here throughout the year in simple, literary-themed cabins, tents, and studio suites.