Black Flags
In the winter, I live a mile from Lake Simcoe. When the lake freezes over, little fish huts appear out on the white expanse like tiny dots of stubborn human ingenuity. I find them oddly comforting. They take me straight back to being young, visiting my granny during March Break, the huts visible way out on the ice from her dining room table.
I’ve never gone ice fishing myself—for reasons that probably don’t require a full paragraph. (But: a small, rickety shack, no toilet, and hours of waiting for a fish to appear through a hole in the ice… not my idea of fun.) Still, I admire the intrepid souls who head out there anyway, into the wind and snow—and sometimes, like today, into blinding winter sunshine.
The short piece below is from my collection An Empty Nest. It’s about loss and grief—both human and animal—tender territory. A short piece with a quiet ending.
If you’d like more stories like this one about my first year living next to Lake Simcoe, get a free digital copy of An Empty Nest here: FREE BOOK
Black Flags
1970. Tyler Walker died today.
I happen upon the line in an old diary.
I am going through my stacks of journals before shredding them, and the entry shocks me—jolts me back to that time when Tyler burnt up in the fish hut. He was a boy Suze and I had known from town. A bad boy, always in trouble. He’d broken into a fish hut out on the frozen lake, lit it on fire, and then couldn’t escape. He’d died, so people said, trying to climb out through the chimney.
A few lines on in the journal, I’d reported Suze shouting, “Liar! I hate you!” when I’d told her the news.
Agony reverberates through the years.
I used to think there was a good reason for keeping a diary—now I can’t remember what it is. Decades after, when all the pain is hidden and scarred-over, a single line still catches and mangles like a carelessly cast fish hook.
I ponder Suze’s angry reaction—and all the millions of cuts and bruises inflicted on me, and by me, since.
The lake is calm. It’s an offshore breeze. Something is floating near the corner of the neighbors’ dock. At first, I think it’s a beaver. “What is that?”
Suze answers, “I don’t know but it looks like a dead body, doesn’t it? It’s been out there all day.”
I take the binoculars from their case and go out on the porch so I can get a better look. It’s a Canada Goose, head down in the water.
As I pass by the fire pit on the lawn, I pick up the long bare stick we use to poke logs as they burn. I cross the beach, stepping carefully to avoid the piles of dark green goose shit. My shoes crunch over the deluge of zebra mussel shells that washed ashore this year after the die-off.
At the end of the dock, the goose’s dark brown and white body floats like a feathered barrel. I look down into the water. The goose’s long black neck disappears into the slimy underwater boards. It must have reached down to nibble something under the dock and got its head stuck. Misery rips through my chest.
The bird’s wings are akimbo. The poor thing must have drowned, frantic and struggling to free its head from the boards. Its funny webbed feet float behind it like two black flags.
I reach the stick down into the water and with no effort at all push on the goose’s neck. The head dislodges from the boards and floats up to the surface. One filmy black eye stares up at me.
The wind is from the south so the feathered corpse drifts out into the lake and away. I return to the cottage. The distress of the drowning leaving my body only slowly. Soon I will forget. Or not forget. But soon the desolation will float from my mind.
Suze crouches in front of the fireplace struggling to strike brittle matchsticks on the side of a damp matchbox.
Please write, I love to hear from you.
Until next time, stay warm!
If this piece resonated…
You will find more of these themes in my books:
Where the Night Winds Wail (Preorder – April 30, 2026)
A story about secrets and second chances.
Odd Mom Out
Reinvention in midlife.
Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand
Fred’s Funeral
An Empty Nest
Chatterbox Poems
Beautiful. Really paints the picture of the lake in winter and ice fishing. The parallel between the boy and the goose, struggling for release before dying. Wow.