Author’s Note: I am currently mid-stream of a new novel, Dead Girl Diaries. The novel is great fun to write in a quirky black-humour kind of way. It explores upon one of the biggest taboos in our society, our own deaths. The main character, Maxine, is newly-dead, and journeying the strange and unexpected geography of the after-life. In the excerpt below, readers get a glimpse of Maxine as a young woman, and as a child.  

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Maxine said, the Ottawa Citizen spread open on the coffee table in front of her, sidetracked from her obituary research by the oddity articles. 

“What’s that?” Ben asked.

“This old lady, what happened to her – how she died, that’s what’s ironic. It says in the newspaper a tree fell on her.”

  “Didn’t anyone yell timber?”

“Guess not. The irony, Ben, it wasn’t just any random tree in any random forest. That would be tragic, but not ironic. The tree that killed her was the very same tree that her father planted a century earlier to celebrate her birth. That tree marked the birth of her, and the death of her. Think of it!”

Think of it, Maxine did.

Photo-flashes clicked across the digital camera of her mind, the synapses of her brain firing like the rapid eye movement of a dream. Images in rapid succession, rapid review, click click click. The exuberant new father in a sleeveless undershirt, the kind that men wore long ago, a shovel gripped in his hands, the sun bearing down click he pushes a boot against the flat edge of the metal shovel, pierces the earth click kneels over, eases the sapling into the hole, the knotted root-ball cradled in his hands click throws dirt into the open spaces, the soil caught mid-air click click click a child crawls click and then walks click and then runs click grows strong of limb as the tree grows strong of limb. She plays with a doll beneath the canopy branches click her first puppy click leans her back against the trunk to write secrets in her diary click a first kiss under the dark night leaves click click click and life goes on, always on, the trunk rings counting the years. The leaves of the tree soft-green and small with spring budding click love, a marriage, the woman burgeoning with child, her features slipping into Maxine’s features, Maxine burgeoning, images and identities and time periods and things that never were mixing like watercolours, the one constant the tree, large and lush and full click Maxine and Ben, their first child, their second in a stroller, and life repeats itself, children and grandchildren, a string of monumental events interspersed among the daily happenings click click click Maxine’s face lined with grief, lined with age click the ashes of her parents, layers of family, layers of life, layers of death, autumn leaves dropping, and then winter, the branches stark and brittle like Maxine’s century old bones.

“What could be a safer bet than planting a sapling to mark the birth of your child?” Maxine asked Ben.  “Who’d ever think you were planting the instrument of your baby’s death?”

  “Death gets everyone, Max. For her it was a rotting tree.”   

  “You’d think you were doing a good thing, planting a tree, wouldn’t you?"

“There’s no blueprint. You want a blueprint, Max?”

“Yeah, I want a blueprint.”

Maxine turned the page of the newspaper, scanned the headlines.

“Do you think things happen for a reason, Ben? I mean, this whole lady’s life led to the exact point in time where she stood under that tree when it fell. In a way, the tree was lead to that exact point, too, that it rotted to the precise extent that when she sat under its branches on the celebration of her hundredth birthday, the tree fell. Not a day before, not a day later, but that exact moment.”

 “Hey, maybe it was murder, Max. An ungrateful son, now an old man himself, sick of waiting for his inheritance, sick of waiting for the old lady to give up the ghost. Maybe he took an axe, and cut a small notch in the rotting tree trunk, set his mother’s lawn chair next to the trunk, and at the right moment, when she was seated in it, leaned against the trunk from the other side.”

  “You think?”

“Nah, not really, more likely an accident. The old lady was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. Bad luck. But then again, how would I know?”

“So sometimes the penny’s lucky and sometime it’s not,” Maxine answered, speaking more to herself than to Ben.   

Sometimes the penny is lucky. Sometimes it is not. Or it's snot, as Maxi's brother, Peter, was fond of saying when they were children, slurring together his words with such a flourish. Thrills, Maxi would answer, tossing her long blond hair to the side with a flip of her head. Those were the days.

Penny, penny, bring me luck, before I stop to pick you up. Such a simple rhyme.  Nice steady beat. Good for turning rope, skipping down the sidewalk, singing away without a worry in the world. Just like Maggie Muggins, the heroine in the first story Maxi had read on her own, a story no kid her own age had heard about, the dusty-paged book a literary relic from her mother’s childhood library. Maggie Muggins, with her copper freckles, almost as big as pennies, if not as big then at least the same colour, her long brown braids flapping behind her like kite tails. Maggie Muggins, singing and skipping down the cobbled path at the end of every story. Maxi would come to the last page, and then shut the book, and feel content and warm and safe and complete, knowing in her heart of hearts that Maggie Muggins still skipped down that cobbled path, exactly the way Maxine had envisioned it.

No Big Bad Wolf to stalk Maggie Muggins, to follow her through the woods on the way to Grandmother's house. That was a different book.

Another story. 

Another little girl. 

Maxine’s father walked miles each day. George kept his eyes cast down, scouring the ground for shiny hints of glitter among the old brown leaves or candy bar wrappers or dirt.  “Spring is the best time,” he said to Maxine. “Snow's melting, washing away the old snow and grime and dirt, exposing loose change lost as far back as the fall and summer.”

Sometimes he'd return home grinning from ear to ear and with a pocket full of coins, silver as well as copper. Once, he found paper money, a “fiver” folded up into a tight little square as if it had once been squirreled away at the bottom of a mitt.

“When you're out walking, keep your head out of the clouds and your eyes wide open for loose change,” he advised Maxine, sharing what seemed at the time to be harmless advice. “It’s mind-boggling to fathom how many people walked right over that money, and didn't bother to look down at their feet.”

George shook his hand in his pocket so the coins jingled.

“All those people with their head in the clouds,” he added smugly.

He seemed quite pleased that he wasn't one of them.

When Maxi saw the penny on the ground, shiny and new, she bent to pick it up, saying the rhyme first, penny, penny, bring me luck, before I stop to pick you up. She felt very lucky. After all, she had found a penny, hadn't she?

She skipped her way to the school grounds. Golda had let her travel the distance by herself, although Peter would meet her there later. It made Maxi feel very old and responsible to be trusted to go the school grounds by herself, but then, she was five now.  She held the penny tight in her hand and felt its luck seep into her. She believed in magic, and luck, and things like that. She believed in Santa Claus, and Tinkerbell, and guardian angels, and miracles.

A lady in floral print and wearing a pink straw bonnet explained the rules of the Easter Egg Hunt. Maxine listened carefully. The Easter Egg Hunt went like this: when the lady gave the signal, a clap of her hands, all the children would scatter and look for little white peas that had been hidden throughout the schoolyard. The hunt would continue for one half-hour. At the end of one half-hour exactly, the lady would clap her hands again, and the children would gather to have their peas counted. The child who found the most peas would win a Laura Secord Easter egg.

Maxi had fantasized the Easter egg hunt. Candy behind every tree, in every crevice, under every rock, hanging from tree branches, hidden everywhere. Instead, they would hunt little white peas, the same kind that Peter shot from his peashooter, and that grew into plants with little white flowers. She pushed away her disappointment.

At first, the peas were easy to find, but as time passed, the hunt grew more difficult. Too may children, too few peas. Finally the lady clapped her hands, and the children gathered around her. Then she counted the peas. She wrote the children's names and “total peas collected by each” on a clipboard. It took a long time.

“How old are you?” the lady finally asked Maxine.

“Five,” Maxine answered, holding up her four fingers and one thumb.

  “Congratulations,” the lady said. “You won the Easter egg for the most peas collected in the five and under category.”

Maxine smiled broadly. Peter hadn't won. Adeline hadn't won. She had won.

She clutched the penny in her pocket, her good luck penny.

She didn't believe in coincidence, at five, too young to fathom the concept. But she did believe in magic. Knew without a doubt that the penny had brought her luck.    

Maxine’s father, George, played the lottery religiously. He calculated his lucky numbers with the precision of a mathematician - applied an illogical logic to predict which six of the forty-nine Ping-Pong balls would happen to be in the right place at the right time, exact conditions set for those six balls alone to fall through the chute into place for some lucky bugger to win a couple million dollars, depending upon the amount of the jackpot that week. 

And for many other unlucky buggers to lose.

George spent hours at the task working his special kind of numerology. Factoring in the winning numbers from the previous week, the birth dates of his children, the time and day he and Golda were married, the house number of their first apartment, their telephone number, the number of letters in his name, the square root of the total of kernels in a popcorn tin, or any other significant factor that caught his fancy. He worked the calculations and reworked them until six sure-fire numbers emerged.

Sometimes, in the middle of the task, George would go out to the back porch, and look upward, and be overwhelmed by the vastness of the sky. He’d try to exert control over the night by counting the stars, but he’d forget at which star he had begun, and have to start all over again, until finally, swamped by the task, swamped by infinity, he’d go back inside the house. Then he'd throw his mathematical scribbling into the trashcan and search out Maxine, badger her to come up with the winning lottery numbers, as if they resided in her subconscious mind. She had only to access them, pull them out of herself like a rabbit out of a hat.

“Give me six numbers,” George would say, pen and paper in hand.

Maxine would pretend she didn't hear him.

  “C'mon, quick,” he’d prodded. “Don't think too much about it. Just whatever combination pops into your brain.” 

Knowing from experience that he would not leave her alone, that he’d badger her all night, she’d give him six numbers. And then he'd look at her dubiously, and say, “Are you sure?”And she would sigh and say, “I'm sure.”

Full of hope, George would wait for the lottery to be drawn.

He’d putter in the garden.  Pick up stones, toss them over the fence, pull weeds, check the growth of the tomatoes and the peas. Watch the nest-building of the birds, bits of string and cellophane and grass hanging from their beaks like streamers from a kite. Baby birds peeking from the round openings in the houses George had built and put high on poles out of the reach of cats, the babies pulling their heads back in, then venturing out again. Becoming braver and braver, until finally they jumped and flew away. George all the while dreaming about the lottery. Little dreams, little indulgences. Nothing big or outrageous, nothing earth shattering or mind altering. No hospital wings built or rainforests saved. Simply gifts he'd bestow upon himself, those he loved, and the occasional unsuspecting stranger. Minor dreams. Minor accomplishments. Somehow not diminished by the adjective, but enhanced by it. There was sweetness about these dreams, and bitterness, too. They were bittersweet.

George never won the lottery.

Oh, he claimed a few minor prizes. Ten dollars here, twenty-five dollars there, once a thousand, but nothing close to the amount he had put into the lottery. He spent twenty dollars a week for twenty years buying lottery tickets.  It doesn't take a mathematical wizard to see he came up on the minus side of the ledger.

Maxine’s mother, Golda, scoffed at George’s methods, although not his desire. Wouldn't mind winning the big one herself. Preferred Bingo, however, to the lottery. Went every Saturday night. Sometimes won. Sometimes didn't. Came out even over the years. But to her husband, it seemed she won all the time.

“Your mother's born under a lucky star,” George said in awe to Maxine this particular night.  Golda had come home with yet another plus outing, twenty dollars richer than when she had left the house, George being at the moment twenty dollars poorer, his numbers eluding him that week.

Movida, the youngest in the family, was the last family member to come home. She opened the door, looked in the hall mirror, saw she was askew, tucked in her blouse, straightened her hair.  “Why don't you just put your foot down?” she said to Golda. “Tell him he can't spend anymore cash on the lottery.”

  “And ruin his entertainment?” Golda answered.

That's the way Golda viewed George's playing the numbers.  Entertainment. No different than a movie and dinner. 

“Better than a night out with the boys at the local tavern or spending money on a hooker, or having an affair,” Golda added, surprising the girls with the reference to sex, if only sex of the alley or backseat variety.

Adeline, the oldest daughter in the family, blushed and left the room.

Maxine started to speak then held back, as was her nature. She kept what she was going to say to herself - that Golda’s comparison didn't fit. The lottery wasn't like going to the tavern with the boys, or a good lay with a hooker, or having an affair. Those situations didn't speak to hope, and that's what the lottery was about in the end when all was said and done.

Hope.