Bumbles felt himself calm down a bit after his beer bath courtesy of CedrosCM. Jinney’s ministrations didn’t hurt either.  A few hours of celebration later he got up. “I’m going to call it a night blokes” he yelled as he stumbled towards the pub’s front door. “I’ll see’s you later, ta”. Bumbles made it to the door, opened it and froze. It was like something strange had passed through his body. He couldn’t tell if it was the beer, his supper of Buffalo chicken wings or a ghost. Maybe it was the cold night air he thought self soothingly. Confused by this conundrum, pondering “what” as deeply as he could, he began to step over the cill. This being an old English pub the cill had energy unto itself. It was if the cill reached up and gleefully tripped him. He tried to grab the door handle but it swung with him. With his immense girth underway a gentle recovery was not in the cards. Bumbles fell sideways in a gentle unrelenting pirouette landing face down in a thicket of brambles growing on the sidewall of the pub.

“Ow, shite. I’m going to kill you, you damn bushes” he screamed. The brambles were unperturbed. Thrashing in his attempts to free himself only made his pain worse so he stopped. Facedown in the thicket Bumbles realized he had well and truly bumbled this time. Any attempt to lift his head caused the thorns hooked in the skin of his face to cut deeper. “My face, it’s on fire” he sobbed.  “I’m going to die, bled to death by a bush”. Pull yourself together Garth (his true name) came the voice of his mother. Lying still he began to sort out a plan to get free, to LIVE. Wriggling his arms he found they were only lightly hooked. Moving eel like, he broke free of the thorns, slowly moving his hands up to his face.  Feeling around with his fingers Bumbles was able to unhook his skin from the crown of thorns ringing his face.

Lifting his head away from the thorns Bumbles noticed an odd disc like thing mixed in with the dirt and blood. Wrenching free he hauled his bulk up grabbing a handful of dirt and hopefully the disc with his left hand.  Finally released from his thorny prison he staggered to his feet only to hear Jinney say “Bumbles what an arse, you’ve destroyed my dessert bush”. Bleeding profusely from multiple lacerations he didn’t have the energy to bellow some profanity at her. Shaking his head Garth staggered down the street toward home, #10 Drowning Street. A block down the street he remembered the odd object he had tried to grab. Looking down he opened his hand. Mixed in with the dirt and clotted blood was an oddly shaped cobalt blue disc. Stuffing it all in his pocket he began to whistle. “Things might be looking up”, he thought. Little did he know…

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This piece was prompted by a fairly serious trifecta of events I experienced in June of this year. June seems to be a month I need to watch out for, as I was seriously injured in a bike/car accident in June 2018. The trifecta was a pulmonary embolism (actually multiple emboli), being infected by COVID 19 and the death of my 96-year-old father. Ironically, the COVID19 infection brought me into the emergency department here in Edmonton, as the combined symptoms of DVT and COVID infection were too much for me to handle.

I heard death breathing on the other side of the door. In fact, the first symptoms of the pulmonary embolism (which I thought was a heart attack) had me down on the floor thinking I was dying. This threat, and the anxiety and fear it generated, finally pushed me to start writing again, to find some life with a shroud of death all around me. The mysterious first step into my story came from a spelling error in an email from Russell Lockhart. Some background is needed here. Russell and Paco Mitchell had been writing an online series titled The Deathling Crown Lottery. In one episode, a character in a pub named Bumbles was briefly introduced. I liked the name and the character. He reminded me of my state of being at the time. In Russell’s email responding to my request to use the Bumbles character name in my story, Russell’s Bumbles, became Brambles. That fortuitous change was the connection I needed to start writing something new. It also connected to many events around my living in England for a year at a time twice when I was much younger.

A synchronicity perhaps. The subsequent writing was therapeutic for me evoking feelings of play connecting me with something mysterious that spontaneously led me in my writing. I began to feel life again inside myself.

Is my story an example of exceptional writing? No, not at all, but that is not the point of it. Since then I’ve wanted to continue the writing, but couldn’t find the next connection or path leading me on until recently. Then, one day, I remembered a story I had started quite some time ago but stopped writing it because I allowed my inner critic to cut me off from it.

In my next blog, I will present the Bumbles piece I wrote and then connect it to the old story.

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