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Something Else Altogether Exclusive Preview (by Derek Hanebury)

Updated: Mar 30, 2022



After over twenty years of writing and rewriting, I’m ecstatic to announce that my collection of short stories Something Else Altogether teeters on the cusp of publication with RCN Media. I wanted to share a little bit about the origins of these stories and why it’s taken so long for me to gather them together between the covers of a book, so I thought a blog might be in order. For me, writing has always been a way to clarity, and hopefully, my readers will find this adjunct to the book helpful in that regard, but not essential. My proposal is to work through the book story by story and examine the kernels that these stories grew out of. Most of them have origins in my lived experience or in the experience of someone I know, but as you’ll see, the inciting spark is sometimes little more than a single image, whereas other times it’s a series of events that somehow demanded connection.


But before we begin, I’d like to share with you the reasons it took so long to get this book out. I could blame my busy schedule and the years I spent immersed in teaching, or I could blame my perfectionism and my love of tinkering with a story until every word belongs, or I could admit I’m just a writer who works in fits and starts with no excuse for taking so damn long to birth the skinny beast, and none of these would be wholly wrong or wholly right. But if I’m honest with myself, (and if not now, when?) I need to look a little deeper at what held me back as I’m sure I’m not alone as a writer in this regard.


Looking back, I was fortunate to have some early success with my stories, winning a few contests and even getting a couple of stories broadcast on CBC radio at a time when CBC radio was the most vital highway in Canada’s literary landscape. In addition, my first longer work, a historical novel got published by Arsenal Pulp Press and enjoyed a reasonable burst of sales for an unknown author who at the time was living as a househusband in a Mennonite community called Buffalo Head Prairie in Northern Alberta, where my wife had landed a job teaching adult education. Despite these early successes, I still dragged my feet for decades when it came to collecting my stories into a bundle and launching them out into the world, and here I think is the main reason why: I love the short story form too much. There, I said it.


To me, short stories are the epitome of the fiction genre for their sheer ambition, for their ability to cram a novel’s worth of life into a few short pages, and for their often-understated symbolism and metaphor, not to mention the way they can bring human character into breathtaking focus. The more good short fiction that I read and taught, the more I demanded of my own work, and the less likely I was to meet those demands. Couple that with a Virgo’s tendency towards perfectionism, and you have the ideal recipe for procrastination. For any writers reading this who may see something of themselves in this pattern, I would encourage you to read “The Dying Writer” in Something Else Altogether, as I think it contains something of an antidote to this paralyzing condition. (More on that later.)



Now, if we peel one more layer of the onion back, we can ask what else is behind that reticence and touch on fear of failure, hypersensitivity to criticism, self doubt, all the typical ailments that have no doubt plagued writers since the first story was committed to a cave wall centuries ago. Imagine being the one chiseling hieroglyphics into a stone wall knowing there was no chance of revising a single symbol. Sounds like a writer’s hell to me!


Anyway, enough said about the road to launching Something Else Altogether, let’s talk about the first story in the collection, “Bungee Love.” This story’s origin can be traced back to a family vacation years back when my wife and I had borrowed a canoe for the trip only to have it blown off our roof rack by a couple of passing trucks. As happens in the story, my wife bailed out and ran back to stay with the canoe while I drove ahead to a turnaround on the divided highway and came back to fetch her. When I got there, she was seated in the stern of the boat with the sweet clover waving in the breeze all around her, and the incongruity of the image struck me as both hilarious and thought-provoking. I couldn’t help but wonder what stories people were concocting in their minds to explain what they were driving by. I filed the image away in my mind only to return to it years later when I used it as a prompt for a piece of flash fiction I was writing for a contest. While the flash fiction didn’t work out well enough to win the contest, it became the germ for the more developed story you will find in the opening pages of the book. I hope you enjoy it and that it sets the stage for the many surprises awaiting you in the stories that follow.





Bungee Love by Derek Hanebury (a free short story)


NESTLED IN THE grassed-over ditch dividing the north and southbound double lanes on Highway 2, a pretty blonde woman named Marjorie sits in a yellow canoe waiting for her husband Brian to return. She wishes now she had needled him more about that jury-rigged combination of rope and bungee cord he had strapped the canoe down with that morning before they left his sister’s house in Calgary. He should have known this stretch of highway turns into a wind chute every day. Toss in a steady parade of semis hauling God-knows-what to God-knows-where, and you’ve got a recipe for peeling off roof racks—let alone loose-strapped canoes.


They’d barely made it past Airdrie when the wind wake from one big honking truck lifted the canoe half a foot off the rack. The next semi, right behind the first one, boosted the thrust of the first truck. The bungee cord didn’t stand a chance: It snapped like an old rubber band. Marjorie spun around just in time to see the yellow canoe in flight, narrowly missing the windshield of the SUV that had been tailgating them for the last ten clicks. Then it nose-dived into the ditch and did a textbook end-for-end like a giant yellow banana executing a perfect 10 before coming to rest on its belly in the knee-high grass. It took Brian the better part of a quarter section to get the Toyota onto the shoulder and stopped he was so stupefied by the twang the bungee cord made when it snapped.


“Let me out!” Marjorie said as soon as they jerked to a stop. “You drive ahead and find a turnaround. I’ll stay with the boat.”


The last thing she wanted was him trying to back the Toyota along the shoulder of the highway in that traffic. Brian didn’t question her. He knew who was going to be blamed for this whenever the trip came up for years to come. He was still catching fire for the time the lawn chairs blew off the roof rack on the way down the big hill coming into Hope two summers ago. Truth was, he hadn’t wanted to bother wrestling the heavy fiberglass canoe into place, let alone tie it down. Like so many things his wife insisted on, he knew it was just a waste of time and energy.



“Picture us paddling crystal waters in mountain lakes,” she had said, but in the end, they had driven straight through the Rockies and used it only once on the small man-made pond his sister’s house fronted on in Calgary, a pond so shallow that every stroke of the paddle brought up weeds trailing a stream of muck. What’s more, despite his being the more experienced paddler, Marjorie had insisted on sitting in the stern, so she could steer and tell him when to switch sides with his paddling as they circled the stagnant slough. If the pond had been deeper, he might have tipped the canoe.


Now he’s starting to feel like he’s stuck in a bad dream. He missed the first exit because he couldn’t find a gap in the traffic big enough to squeeze into, and now it’s been miles without another exit. He can already hear the harangue she’ll unleash on him, every word biting like a hatchet through his thin skin. The thought occurs to him that he could keep driving north to the Peace Country without her and avoid the hatcheting altogether. For a few long seconds, the thought gains traction. He’d be free, flying solo at last, all the way to the Peace Country where he had grown up cradled in that ample valley of the Peace River, the hills silver with sage and studded with prickly pear cactus. It might take a bit of time, but he could get over Marjorie, he figures He remembers when his childhood sweetheart, Elsie Gartner, had dumped him the night before he left for university. That had nearly taken him out until a friend hooked him up with a Reiki healer. The woman spent about five minutes scanning his field with her hands before she said, “You seem to have some cords ripping a hole in your navel chakra. Did you just break up with someone?”


“Yeah,” he replied, “my girlfriend dumped me about six months ago.”


“No worries,” she said, “we can help you with that.”


She worked her fingers like scissors and made as if she were snipping strings around his belly before working her palm in a circular orbit above his naval. Brian felt an intense heat build in his gut, and then suddenly it vanished. By the time he got off the table, he felt like a new man.


Now he wonders if Elsie might not still be in Peace River. The last few times he stalked her on Facebook, she was there and not in a relationship. When an exit looms ahead, he delays putting his signal on as if daring himself to see how close he can come to busting loose. He has seen how easily it can happen: A pair of fingers scissoring the air, a couple of wind gusts at the right moment, and the cord lets go, or the off-ramp passes.


As the minutes stream past like the traffic, Marjorie starts to wonder where he is. She hadn’t even paused to grab her phone when she jumped out of the car. What if something happened to him when he was trying to turn around? Maybe he had taken one of those emergency vehicle U-turns and misjudged how fast the oncoming traffic was going. She had saved him from miscalculations like that on more than one occasion in the past, screaming him to a halt at the last second. But he was on his own now. She does the math in her head, weighing his life insurance against the money still owing on the house, and then factors in the car payments and the interest on the line of credit. It’s all doable till she gets to the part where she comes home from work to an empty house with no one there to cut the grass. Her mother had managed that one though, paid the neighbour kid to mow the lawn and never mentioned her father again without prefixing it with the word “bloody.” But at least her mother had had her across the dinner table to talk with every night until she headed off to UBC after high school.


She begins to scan the southbound traffic a little more earnestly. Trucks in the passing lane flatten the clover as they blow by. In her head she hears the twang of that bungee letting go like the opening note of a sad country and western song about lost love. She doesn’t stop to wonder what all those people must be thinking as they drive by a lone blonde woman sitting in a yellow canoe in a grassy meridian, miles from the nearest water.


When the shiny black pick-up pulls onto the shoulder and stops with two wheels nudging the clover, a twinge of fear ripples through her stomach. But when a muscular cowboy with a black Stetson and a well-trimmed moustache steps out of the driver’s side, she takes one look at his face and relaxes. She’s always had a soft spot for cowboys, especially seasoned ones a few years older than her. He’s got high cheekbones with a trace of red flushed across them, and his teeth shine a pearly white next to the dark moustache. He walks a bow-legged amble down into the ditch, stopping a safe distance away from her before he starts to speak.


“I have to ask,” he says, “did I miss something in the forecast this morning, or did somebody just drop you off out here without a paddle?”


His voice is pure oak and honey, a deep baritone that Marjorie imagines could calm a high-strung horse as easily as it could charm the panties off her granny. She knows she should tell him about Brian looping around to fetch her, but instead she hears herself say, “I’m collecting grasshoppers and crickets, two by two, if that helps you at all.”


“I knew I should have traded my truck in for a hybrid,” he says. “Now I’m gonna drown and go to hell for driving a gas-guzzling Ford.”


“The Big Guy might forgive you, considering you live on top of all that oil and gas. I mean he wouldn’t have put it here if he didn’t want us to use it, right?”


“Yeah, I always figured driving a hybrid in Alberta would be a bit like being a vegan in a butcher shop. Besides, you can’t stack much hay in the trunk of a Tesla. Name’s Virgil by the way.” He tips his Stetson an inch or two, then looks at her and waits.


“Marjorie,” she says, “but most people call me Marj.”


A gust of wind from a semi rolls over them, and Virgil puts his hand on top of his hat. His hands look meaty and well tanned. “Nice to meet you, Marj. So, seriously, are you waiting for a tow truck, or can I give you a lift somewhere? I’ve got enough rope in the truck we could strap your canoe down. It’s not in my blood to leave anybody stranded.”


In the few seconds before she responds, she imagines they have already loaded the boat and driven to his ranch where he carries her inside and lays her down on a bearskin rug in front of the fireplace he built from river rock. “No, I’m good,” says Marjorie, “though I could use a cell phone if you’ve got one handy.”


“Up in the truck,” he says with a jerk of his thumb. “You’re welcome to it, so long as you’re not calling Revenue Canada. They’ll have you on hold for half a day.” He flashes those white teeth again, and Marjorie vows to buy herself some of those whitening strips the next time she has the chance.


She follows him up to the truck. The scent of the clover fills her nose, and everywhere the bees dip in and out of the blossoms. He opens the door and points at his cell phone on the seat. “There you go. You might as well hop in the cab, so you can hear yourself talk over the traffic.”


He stands there holding the door for her with his gaze trained on the ground. She takes one look down the highway at the endless stream of trucks and cars and slides into the driver’s seat. The cab smells vaguely of horses and whiskey. This Virgil is pure cowboy and about as far from Brian as Garth Brooks is from Ed Sheeran. She picks up the phone and taps on the screen. “It’s locked,” she says and offers it up to him.


“Oh, yeah. Here, I’ll put in my pin. Skootch over.”



He climbs into the truck, leaving her no choice but to slip across to the passenger seat before handing him the phone. When he closes his door, both the door locks click down with a heavy thunk.


“Automatic child locks. Ford thinks of everything,” Virgil says with a smile.


Something in that flash of white strikes Marjorie the wrong way. The top layer of teeth was white as table salt, but the bottom ones were stained brown as old tea. Chewing tobacco probably. And veneers on the top teeth. She moves to the far side of the cab and pushes her back against the door. In the box of the truck, she can see a neat coil of rope. It looks like the rope she saw the cowboys at the Calgary Stampede use to lasso and truss up young cattle when she and Brian went with his sister a few years back. She remembers being amazed at how fast they could have all four legs tied into a bundle. At the Stampede grounds, she hadn’t felt too bad for the calves, but she has a new appreciation for their pain now. This is all bloody Brian’s fault.


Virgil taps the screen, types in a few digits and glances at the top corner. “Hmmm, dead zone. We’ll have to drive ahead until we find some service. It can be a bit touch-and-go out here in the boonies.”


Brian debates whether he should pull over to the shoulder on the southbound lanes adjacent to the canoe or drive past Marjorie to the next exit and loop back, so he’ll be pointing in the right direction when they load the canoe. Leaving her out there longer might give her time to cool down, or then again, it could just make her angrier that it happened in the first place. In the end, he decides that whichever way it plays out, it will delay his having to face her if he slips past and comes back around.


If she knew his reasoning, she’d probably call him a chicken like she had when he hesitated to jump off the bridge when they bungee jumped on Vancouver Island not long after they met. At the time, he had taken it as a do-or-die moment for their future. It had been all he could do to keep his legs from shaking, but somehow he managed to look her in the eyes, smile, and then turn and nosedive off the steel platform. He has no recollection of the descent to the river below. It was almost as if his soul had checked out for the necessary eternity of the fall and didn’t check back in until his head dunked in the icy water of the Nanaimo River.


Brian sees the silhouette of a cowboy hat before he catches sight of Marjorie walking behind the hat, heading towards a pick-up truck on the shoulder of the road. The sight renders a jolt to his belly akin to what he imagines it must be like when you get tasered. He regrets not being in the fast lane now where he could pull over close to the canoe, but he had been hoping to get in front of a semi and slow down to force it to pass him just at the right moment to hide him from Marjorie’s sight as he blew by her. Now a cargo van slides past, obscuring her from his vision, but it doesn’t matter. He’s seen enough.


“What the hell is she thinking?” he wonders as he punches the accelerator and the Toyota’s engine responds with a high whining surge. He scoots by the cargo van and pulls out into the passing lane in front of it. He keeps reminding himself to breathe as he scans the highway ahead for an exit. After an anxious couple of miles, and half of another, he can’t believe his luck when he sees an emergency U-turn looming fast ahead of him.


He puts on his blinker and pumps the brake pedal to make sure the traffic behind him is aware of his intention. His brakes squeal a little as he skids into the turn-around. He can stop if he has to, but after a quick glance, he opts to swing out onto the highway despite the stream of cars bearing down on him. “Please, God,” he says aloud as he tromps the accelerator pedal to the floor. He carves over into half of the slow lane before correcting back into the passing lane.


Things begin to feel slightly surreal. It’s like he is aware of only one thing, the open space ahead of him that he is groping for. Somewhere behind him, a high-pitched sound erupts, squealing tires or sirens, he’s not sure, but it is practically eclipsed by the scream of his engine, and he bears down on the pedal even harder as if he could push it clear through the floorboards. He doesn’t dare cast a glance in his rearview mirror. For a moment, he can almost hear Marjorie’s voice saying, “What are you, chicken?”


“You know it’s probably not that important that I make that call,” says Marjorie. “I’m sure my husband will be here any minute. Besides, I shouldn’t leave the canoe out in the middle of nowhere. Someone’s likely to make off with it, and it’s not even ours.”


“Oh, married are you?” says Virgil. “Happily, I hope.”


He’s facing her now, and close-up like this she can smell the sweet overtone of whiskey on his breath, see the zig-zag of red blood vessels dissecting the whites of his eyes.


“Oh yeah, Brian’s great,” she says. She surprises herself with the enthusiasm in her voice, though right now she’d give anything to be home with him making lunch or doing any of another hundred beautiful, mundane things that make up their life together. She reaches for the door lock, but it won’t budge an inch.


“Sometimes, you just need to roll a hundred yards ahead to find service, you know. Let’s give it a whirl.” He starts the engine and shifts the transmission into drive.


“No, really. Don’t. It’s fine,” says Marjorie. “Please, just let me out.” She has one hand on the door handle as she waits to hear the locks release, but instead she hears the grinding of fine gravel under the tires as they begin to roll forward. She presses her back against the door and pushes with her legs, but she knows it’s a waste of energy. She scans the cab for anything she could use as a weapon to defend herself. His keys are the only possibility, and they’re way too close to his meaty hands for her to consider reaching for them. She watches him glance up at his rearview mirror and sees his eyes spring open. Her head snaps around to look so fast it hurts her neck.



About Derek Hanebury

Derek Hanebury is a Vancouver Island writer of fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. Something Else Altogether is his first solo collection of short stories, following the 2020 publication of Both Sides Now (RCN), which was a compilation of stories co-authored with Vicki Drybrough, and Libbie Morin, and the 2006 publication of Nocturnal Tonglen (Ekstasis) a collection of poems. His first novel, Ginger Goodwin: Beyond the Forbidden Plateau, (Arsenal Pulp) went to a second printing. He has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from UBC and taught writing at North Island College on Vancouver Island until his retirement in 2017.



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