If anyone is generous enough to buy my book Look Them in the Eyes… I suggest the ebook to avoid the ridiculous $22 delivery charges!

https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000340181607

Dennis Mantin

1st Novel Published!

Any support appreciated!

https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000340181607

Walked in silence on the snows hard crust. My mind it roamed from wrong to the just. I watched an eagle swing from the sky… The silence was broken with his mighty cry.

He looked so proud. He looked so tough. His freedom, his kingdom. His only musts.

Then, a mighty thrust that shook the air. In seemingly gloom and much despair. His blood fell on his rocks from our of the air… And the silence was broken beyond repair.

No doubt nine times out of 10; Suicide is killing yourself in spite of yourself.

I’ve been listening to the masses.

They be trying to bring me down.

I’ve been taking master classes.

Ever since the blues dropped into town.

They are talking about oppression.

Like, it’s shiny and brand new.

So much horror in that lesson.

That ironic cake to chew.

They are raging, eyes are blurry.

Tears they fall like April rain.

Going nowhere in such a hurry.

Like they just discovered pain.

I’ve been looking for a chorus. That won’t break us into songs. Maybe something just to bore us. Take our rights back from the wrongs…

The north coast of Nova Scotia is somewhere between the middle of nowhere and God’s country.

Somehow, I was still there when I was 18, and she’d been dead for 7 years. I would still look for her whenever I was in a crowd of people. Straining searching. Imagining that she had faked her death to get away from me. My mother. By the fall of 1977, I guess I figured she was really dead. All of this I kept to myself. Winding wrapped tight. In my tiny bedroom on a twin bed in a mobile trailer on an acre of land at the edge of Deception River is where the nightmare began…

I ripped out the window screen at the foot of the bed one night and the screen at the head of the bed the next. Screaming some nonsensical rage about “I’ll get you! You motherfuckers!” The next morning the fingernails were torn and bloodied from ripping out screens. Both windows smashed.

I could hear the breathing coming from something somewhere. I held my breath and lay still on my bed, making sure it wasn’t me. I looked under the bed and under the trailer. Nothing. I was alone… except for whatever was breathing. It felt like it was coming from inside me. I had never been so terrified. I forgot to pray. I forgot God.

After a few days and nights of this, I realized that I had to leave that bed, that bedroom,that trailer, that acre, that river.

I left and never returned…

The leaves have fallen to the gutters except the ones still clinging to October. November knows no mercy.

I am playing with fire again. Juggling cheques and rent. All games that I have grown to old for except I am not worried like before. Now I know that somehow all will work or not.

The strikers are being played by stage players this time, waving their little signs with phrases of discontentment; no doubt written by the writers waiting patently to go somewhere other than picket lines…

C’mon, for the love of Christ, get this thing settled! I’ve sold everything I can sell, and I’m watching reruns of Game of Thrones.

Women have fascinated me for much of my life. Early on, I had this deep need to understand them or me or me with them, either through observation or dare I say love?

However, through time, either the need has passed or I just accepted my own failures in this regard and have just moved on to parenting.