Short Stories WR Woodbury

    Like a sailboat tacking toward a harbour, my fingertip strayed through Texas, Arizona, California, and Colorado, before stopping on a resonant name.  "Here," I said.  "Here is where I want to go."        A week later, in an air-conditioned taxi heading for Moisant Airport, I confessed to last minute misgivings.        She stared out the window at the delta flatlands on which an uneven crop of factories, power poles, and eucalyptus, gasped under a sticky sun.  "Ain't nobody's life but your own," she said, implying that she still didn't agree with my decision.        "You got in your mind what you'll do when you get there?" she asked, being an habitual practitioner of foresight, never my strongest suit.        A whiff of sulphur dioxide penetrated the taxi's defences and provoked a familiar nausea that I willed down with worse thoughts.  "I imagine calling them foul names," I said, "or I imagine them dead.  Bu

     Okotoks was originally a railway town divided into a grid of rectangular blocks, each the length of a stream train.  By the end of the century It had since burst its prairie-section boundaries and become a spruce and poplar filled bedroom community of identical curving streets and stubby cul-de-sacs built for Calgary commuters.  The town is far enough east of the Rockies that the mountains look like a frosty rumble strip across the western horizon.         Danny’s six year old son Luke sat up tall in the passenger’s seat.  “Dad!” He pointed to a sign for a trailer park that was squeezed between the original town-site along the river, and the newer industrial area that served the remnants of the oil and sulphur fields.   “You have to turn here for grandma’s place.”   Danny was always surprised by his son’s alertness and awareness. Like his father, Luke wasn’t very talkative but he didn’t miss much.  He was at an age of difficult questions. “Are we rich or poor?” or “Are you going t