Johnny Kellock Died Today by Hadley Dyer

Frost clinging to the tip of a long, perfectly straight nose. You see the crusty snow under your own feet. First you sketch out what you’re working on-an old picture of Norman, in this case. But the thing about it is, when you’re drawing your father, the first person you ever saw when you were shooting out into this world, you want to get it right. They stared back, vacant-like, edges fading into the paper. He was standing beside a cow with a dog in his arms. In the photograph, his eyes were in the shadow of his cap. I was sitting on the stairs in our old house on Agricola Street, the backs of my legs sticking to the tiny ridges of the rubber treads.

It was my twelfth birthday, and it was my first and only cigarette.Īnd it was the last time we all sat together like that.

We gathered round Mama’s kitchen table in the usual order, oldest to youngest-Freddie, Margaret, Doris, Young Lil, Martha, and me, Rosalie-and we smoked. Or every Sunday afternoon if nothing’d happened in between. And it ends with us Normans doing what we always used to do whenever something bad happened. Mine starts when Johnny had already disappeared. It’s like if you pulled on a bit of yarn, and you pulled and pulled until the whole sweater’s come unravelled and you’ve got a mess of yarn at your feet and then someone has the bright idea that you should try to find the end you started with.Īnyway, as Mama says, a person should stick to their own story. No one knew why exactly Johnny did what he did. The Queen wore a pink dress and a white hat, and she looked a lot like television pictures of the Queen but in colour. The rest of the world was lined up on Barrington Street, trying to get a glimpse of Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, on their first trip to Halifax. Or, at least, that’s the day after the last day anybody ever saw him. Johnny Kellock disappeared on August 1, 1959.

Johnny Kellock Died Today by Hadley Dyer