The Stranger

Welcome to The Spot Writers. The prompt for this month is to write a story that starts with “The stranger appeared.”

This week it’s Cathy MacKenzie’s turn. Her writings are found in numerous print and online publications. She recently published WHEN KAYAKS FLY, a mix of fantasy, real life, and gallows humour. A fun read! Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1990589332.

Check out www.writingwicket.wordpress.com for further information on Cathy’s works. 

***

The Stranger

by Cathy MacKenzie

 The stranger appeared beside me, not that I immediately realized he was a stranger. I had just slumped onto the concrete steps behind the double doors to the swimming pool and was glaring at the stars. Seconds earlier, I had shrieked to the skies. Was that why this person appeared?  To save me from myself?

“I know how you feel,” he said. “It’s a crying shame.”

Really? He wasn’t your son. How can you possibly understand?

“Too young,” he said.

That much was true. Thirty-six, a fresh life ahead after his marriage ended. Two children. A serious girlfriend. Plans for more children. My grandchildren...

“I don’t know how you cope.”

I didn’t either.

He rambled, on and on. And on... Lame words.

I was mute, wishing he’d allow me my private time. To scream profanities at God. To be careless in grief. To shed endless tears. I was sick of worthless words. Sick of lies.

The sinister stranger disappeared, taking with him his useless, idle chitchat. I cringed at my rudeness, but I was a grieving mother; I had that right. “I didn’t invite you here,” I mumbled.

My hands cradled my cheeks. Tears streamed between my fingers, and I brushed them through my hair, wanting to yank out every strand, grey or not.

I was jostled from my thoughts when someone plopped beside me. Another stranger, I figured. He huffed and puffed as if he’d raced across the yard, as if a fire needed dousing.

What in the heck was this? Grand Central Station? Those were words my mother once spewed. Would’ve been her reply to my question if death hadn’t robbed her before Matt’s diagnosis. Would she, having birthed five kids, have understood something as foreign as child loss? I didn’t think so.

This stranger placed his hand on my knee. Didn’t rub. Didn’t speak.

“I can't believe it,” I said, marring the silence. “My best wasn’t good enough. I failed my child.”

Numerous rollercoasters of life and death were my son’s last days during his last two months. “Why’d he have to endure that hell?” I asked the silent stranger, not expecting an answer. Not wanting an answer.

I gasped, fresh tears streaming. “I wasn’t letting my son die. A mother’s supposed to protect her children, right?”

I swatted at tears. “I found a doctor who rips out hearts, who replaced Matthew’s cancerous heart with a mechanical one, a plastic device pummelling vicious and vocal against his chest, both Matt and the heart kept alive by a monster machine thundering against his ears. Against our ears. One hundred twenty beats a minute. Thump thump thump. No stopping for breath, no deviation from endless monotones of whacking drumsticks trying to thwart the devil.”

I stopped. Had to catch my breath. I hated to share, wanted to share. I needed to remember my son. To keep him alive. Even in death.

“Docs here wouldn’t give him a real heart, couldn’t take a chance cancer lurked. Couldn’t waste a precious heart.” I glanced at the faceless form obscured by shadows. Or a mirage. Had he sensed my sarcasm? Probably not. Even smart people are dumb these days.

Oddly, I was comforted by this person’s passive presence, so unlike the chatty stranger.

“The artificial heart gave him an infection days after the surgery. Then they put him on the donor list.” A little too late, I thought. Why couldn’t they have put him on the list immediately? He could still be here!

I sighed, privatizing the rest of my thoughts: The phone call. His voice! Excitement. Hope. No fear. “I have a heart, Mom. I have a heart.”

Life!

Oh, my son, you’ve always had a heart.

I had wept for another mother who lost while I would win—or so I thought at the time.

I glanced at darkness beside me. “Life’s not fair. Oh, I know, we have to make the best of it. What choices do we have?”

My son had expected me to save him, to miraculously wrench out of his Patriots ball cap a rabbit clutching a magic potion. Oh, how he loved the Patriots. And his new-to-him truck. And the house purchased four months before his illness.

No—not illness! Scourge. The scourge upon his heart. But no worries, docs had said. A meaningless mass, a blip on the X-ray. They’d take care of it.

Doctors were supposed to be magicians too.

“No one saved him,” I said, staring at the sky, talking to twinkling gems. I stood, arms outstretched, trying to snatch one from obscurity. What if that brightest one was Matthew? Could I steal it, return it to earth?

Do stars sparkle when we can’t see them? Are they like trees in the forest that topple without a sound unless we’re present? Do stars hide by day, ever watchful? Do loved ones peep through the void between the shimmers?

I balled my hands into fists and screamed, shed more tears, not caring about silly stars. Not caring about the man beside me, who was still motionless. Still mute.

Too many questions. No answers. I didn’t know what was real, what was fake. What was the truth, what was a lie. What did it mean: life, death?

I once thought I was an exception, an anomaly. I lost a child. How many mothers lose children? But there are lots of us. And I never knew. Too many lights in Heaven shine through the black.

I should have died—not him.

The stranger removed his hand from my leg, disappearing into the night.

Once again, I was alone. Alone with stars that could be souls. And if that were true, I wouldn’t be alone…

 

***

The Spot Writers:

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/

The Masque of Flu A

Welcome to the Spot Writers. This month’s prompt is to start a story using the phrase, “the stranger appeared…”

Today’s tale comes to us from Val Muller, author of the kidlit mystery series Corgi Capers.

 

The Masque of Flu A

by Val Muller

 

The stranger appeared out of nowhere, but his entry was almost an answer to Melanie’s thoughts. Just a moment ago, she had been surveying the martial arts studio, marveling that none of the students or their families appeared ill.

Could it actually be that they would make it to Sophie’s February birthday party without any illness or snow? The coincidence of weather and health in the winter was like a lottery win, and it hadn’t happened for two years now. Third time’s a charm? Despite flu cases burning through the country?

At least that’s what Melanie had been thinking when the stranger walked in.

He was a man she had not seen before, and that was strange here at the studio. She knew all of the families who attended, at least by sight. This was an old man—and she used that term sparingly, even in her thoughts, ever since the day she realized she was now what her child-self would have considered old. But this man was old in the literary sense.

He was gaunt—yes, that’s the word she would use. He had a face stretched thin against his bone-lines. He looked like a character that would have stepped directly out of an Edgar Allan Poe story. And yet he wore the uniform of the studio, and his green stripe belt suggested he had been a student for several months now. A septuagenarian, she thought. There was no way he was in his sixties, even. He may have been eighty.

The shoes he wore were better suited for the summer, and for summers decades earlier. The ancient leather straps looked like they had slurped up the salty sludge from the snowy sidewalk. And in them, the man seemed to walk almost without moving his legs, as if he floated across the floor.

Melanie froze. Instinctively, her toddler abandoned his attempts to get out onto the dojo floor and instead clung to his mother’s knee.

“It’s okay,” Melanie told the child, though really she was telling herself. It would be okay. Class was almost over. They had only three days until the party. No one was sick. All would be well.

The man was now shoeless and had joined the already-in-session class. How that had happened in the few seconds Melanie looked down to address the toddler was anyone’s guess.

If this were a piece of literature, here would be the tone shift, Melanie thought. It started with the late arrival. Everybody knew the rules. No arriving late to the dojo. And yet he had, and none of the instructors said a word. The class simply absorbed him like the night absorbs fog.

Then, the clearing of a throat. A few of the students looked up at the old man, appearing almost as startled as Melanie felt. They were used to a few of the parents joining classes, but no one this age. Not at this studio. No one knew the man.

If this were a movie, the lights would have dimmed a little, maybe taken on a greenish tint. Accented by ominous music. Melanie knew at this point, it was inevitable.

The story played in her head as her toddler continued to cling. It was a story she studied in high school, one that had been passed around during the early days of COVID. It was Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” The story hadn’t stayed with her consciously, but apparently it was there, etched in her brain.

It was medieval times, wasn’t it? The time of the Black Death. Poe wrote a group of aristocrats who had locked themselves in a castle, thinking they would escape the plague in entertainment. There was a party, everyone wearing elaborate masks, and the castle was decorated so each room was a different color. It was a magical evening, Halloween-esque in its whimsy.

And at the end, of course, the colors turned red and black and deadly as everyone realized a single stranger had entered the party and, of course, carried the plague. If she remembered correctly, everyone ended up dead.

She watched the old man as he rotated to each station. First to the Wavemaster, then to the push-up station marked by spots on the floor. Then to the sparring ring, where he interacted with countless others. All the while, his coughing became more pronounced. Others stopped to look. Someone asked if he needed water.

“That cough sounds a lot like Flu A,” another mother whispered to Melanie. Both women instinctively scooched one inch further away form the old man.

How did Poe’s story end? Something about a clock at the end, she believed, striking the end of health and life. Maybe it chimed twelve, or perhaps thirteen.

The room had somehow silenced. Even the toddler was quiet. Then, on queue, someone’s phone sounded. Everyone looked up. 

“I forgot to turn off my alarm,” another parent said sheepishly. But Melanie knew. She looked at the mat, and the students stood, bewildered. The old man was gone. Vanished. Melanie looked for his shoes under the bench, but a sound overpowered her thoughts. It was the cough of a young child at the Wavemaster, echoed by the cough of her Sophie before traveling through all the room.

Three times was not a charm.  

 

The Spot Writers—Our Members:

Val Muller: http://valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/

 

Wintrugloria - Winter Hymn

Welcome to the Spot Writers. This month’s prompt is to write a poem about winter.

This week’s contribution comes from Chiara De Giorgi. Chiara is an Italian author and currently lives in Berlin, Germany. She writes fiction, with a focus on children’s literature and science fiction.

 

Wintrugloria - Winter Hymn

by Chiara De Giorgi

 

created with Canva

A walk a day, the doctor says,

Keeps all the pains and aches away.

So I follow this advice

Come the sun, come rain, come ice.

On the bridge I tread with care,

Freezing for the chilly air;

But around me, screaming, calling,

Seagulls try to get me falling.

Should it happen, should I fall,

I couldn’t keep my vow at all.

To skid and slip to the other side,

Against a pillar to collide:

These don’t really count as walk,

And I don’t intend to mock

The prescription from my doc—

For him, that would be a shock.

*

So I ask the wind to push me,

Let the seagulls behind be,

Fight for chips, steal a bite,

Pester crews from morn till night.

*

The wind listens to my call,

Picks me up like I were small,

Takes me home on her wide wings,

Without need for me to cling.

*

Now I stand bewildered, baffled,

I am truly very puzzled.

‘Take your walks where seagulls lack,’

The wind whispers at my back.

‘Lest you end up down the bridge

(Which is cooler than a fridge).’

*

I am left here, all alone,

As the wind away has blown.

The night is still, the stars now gleam,

I am sitting in a moonbeam,

And with all my heart I wish

This were nothing but a dream.

 

* * *

The Spot Writers—Our Members:

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/

The Way I See It

 

Welcome to the Spot Writers. This month’s prompt is to write a poem about winter. Today’s contribution comes to us from Phil Yeats, the sole member of the group’s anti-poem brigade.

 

In April, 2024, Phil Yeats published The Body on Karli’s Beach, the third book in his Barrettsport Mysteries, a series of soft-boiled mysteries set in a fictional South Shore Nova Scotia town. For information about these books, and The Road to Environmental Armageddon, his trilogy about the hazards of ignoring human-induced climate change, visit his website: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/

 

The Way I See It

by Phil Yeats

 

A poem about a Canadian winter (political and meteorological), drafted on January 6, 2025, the day the PM resigned.

 

He swooped into power,
promising sunny ways
while making aspirational statements
about our glorious future.

 

His frivolous foreign exploits ruined our reputation.
Too few promises led to real improvements.
Scandals accumulated, as they so often do.
The number of intractable problems
rivalled the growth in our national debt.

 

A decade later, he addressed the nation outside Rideau Cottage
bare-headed, wearing his winter coat in frigid, ice-bound Ottawa.
His way, he said, was the only proper one.
The MPs finally saw their duty to the country.
They refused to bow on every issue.

 

In what became his winter of discontent,
he couldn’t rely on his acolytes’ blind obedience.
He locked the doors to the rink and disappeared.
Was he seeking sunnier climes to plot his comeback?
Or something else?

 

From sunny ways
through scandal-riddled days.
It really was
all about him.

 

The Spot Writers:

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/

 

Winter’s Poem

Welcome to The Spot Writers. The prompt for this month is to write a poem about winter.

This week it’s Cathy MacKenzie’s turn. Her writings are found in numerous print and online publications. She writes all genres but invariably veers toward the dark—so much so her late mother once asked, “Can’t you write anything happy?” (She can!)

She recently published WHEN KAYAKS FLY, a mix of fantasy, real life, and gallows humour. This book was made possible after three years of Spot Writers’ prompts—after much editing, re-writing, and adding chapters (a couple of poems too!). Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1990589332.

Check out www.writingwicket.wordpress.com for further information on Cathy’s works.

 

 ***

 Winter’s Poem

by Cathy MacKenzie

 

Once upon a time

During winters long ago,

A woman wrote poems

No one read

For she was always alone,

Dreading warm seasons

Turning cold,

But her heart thawed

When snow blanketed the brown,

Turning her world into a

Magical winter wonderland.

 

Sitting by the window,

Sipping vino chilled,

She weaved words

Into her world

While yearning to race outdoors,

Stick out her tongue like a child,

Catch those illusive flakes.

 

Instead, she sipped more wine,

Wrote another line

And two...

 

But curiosity intervened:

She ventured outdoors,

Pulled her sweater across her chest,

Watched her breath form clouds,

Heard the crunch of snow beneath her feet.

 

With head held high,

She recited a poem:

 

“Winter is the reason I write

For beauty exists in simplicity,

And simple words magically

Wipe away the past.”

 

’Twas a poem in her head,

One never before then shared,

And she imagined each line resonating

Within hearts of listeners

Young and old,

Wrapping them in layers of warmth

While transported into her world

Of winters dreamy and magical.

 

When she paused

To take a breath

Spontaneous applause erupted,

Mixed with joyous shouts and laughter:

You’re a hit!

You’re a star!

 

Imagination and dreams

Were her sole friends

Though memories

Never failed to intrude.

 

Winters continued to come and go,

Her poetry upbeat despite

Heartbreaks

Negating promises tenfold.

 

But as snowflakes twirled

And slowly swirled

Amidst the day’s beating of cold

And night about to fold,

She glimpsed a stray star

Away so far

And shrieked:

 

“My poems, hid from the cold,

Scream of sins of old,

’Tis the reason flowers cried

And froze o’er them who died.”

 

She paused,

Reflected.

 

Darkness took over her world,

She knew not what transpired

For it happened too fast

And her last words echoed

From high above:

 

“In this celestial flight

All feels perfect and right.”

 

Her heart always thawed

As snow blanketed the ground,

When she weaved words of winter

Into a faraway world.

 

***

The Spot Writers:

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/