It was a chilly fall afternoon that a large white luxThe Story That Ruined A Man And His Worldury yacht glided into North Bay. Four couples of snowbirds disembarked from the boat and began their stay at the local bed and breakfast, which was really no more than a four room cabin with a small kitchen, propane stove and fridge. No one wanted to go outside because the paths on Ruxton Island were muddy and the steep rocky shores were covered in slippery seaweed. Even so it was a perfectly tranquil environment with little brown birds chirping in trees and river otters playing at the point of the bay. Nothing could go wrong in a place so natural.
After a few hours, the owner of the property arrived at the cabin and welcomed the travelers to his retreat. The snowbirds unpacked their bags and got cozy as night fell. Let us say that the names of the couples were Fred and Abby, Josh and Lucy, Garth and Gail, and Louis and Daphne. The owner of the property was called Mickey.
When everyone was settled, Mickey started a fire in the wood stove, because it gets cold at Ruxton in the fall. It would also make the retreat much more romantic.
Unfortunately, even with the ambiance that the fire created, Garth was bored. He was not exactly accustomed to retirement yet, and was even less accustomed to a cabin setting. Before retirement he was an accountant and had become a workaholic, and workaholics don’t get out much.
To make himself less bored he asked his wife to tell everyone a story. She was a published author – she had to know how to tell a good tale. Hopefully it would be something funny.
Gail shrugged and looked at the fire dance on the arbutus logs in the wood stove. She began her story with:
“There was once an old man who lived on this island. He was the sole survivor of a terrible car crash that killed his family, so he had terrible trouble sleeping at night. The only thing that helped his insomnia was to sleep in other people’s beds. Once he even slept in this cabin.
As the story goes, if he ever found anyone else in their cabin, he would kill them. His name was-”
“STOP” shouted Mickey, whose face had turned the colour of the light grey linens on the cabin’s beds. “You need to take it back! I don’t kill people. I just don’t sleep right.”
“Well, we all heard it now,” said Garth “– and I think that I’m going to sleep in the yacht tonight.”
“Me too,” said Lucy, and the others nodded in agreement.
Mickey’s bed and breakfast business failed soon after. In his sorrow he burned down his cabin, which set the whole of Ruxton Island on fire. If it hadn’t been for Gail’s story and the negativity that went with it, he would have preceded as normal, sleeping in other people’s beds when their inhabitants were away, and no one would have been the wiser.
Let it be known that stories can be entertaining, but they can also be harmful. It is stories like Gail’s that brought evil into the world.
Once you have told a story, you can never take it back. So, be careful of the stories you tell, AND the stories you listen to.
Here is the conversation that I had with my fiance after I finished telling him the story. I would have told it to a bigger audience but we are currently on a secluded island:
Ljay: “I like that you used true stories from the island that we know and people whom we know as the characters.”
Me: “They’re just the first things that popped into my head. What did you think of the story?”
Ljay: “I’m wondering why the story of the man who slept in other people’s beds became a negative story when he really ended up with a new family in a different place.”
Me: “Oh. I needed to have a negative story for my assignment.”
Ljay: “Fair enough. Why would Gail tell a negative story at a retreat though. I thought you said that Mickey tried to create romantic ambiance and that other guy wanted to hear a funny story.
Me: “Because scary stories go well with the light from wood stoves at night. You know that.” (Personal Interview, 22 September 2016.)
Other Commentary:
Unfortunately Ljay did not comment at all about the theme of the story like I expected him to. He reads quite a bit and listens to stories on the radio constantly when he is at Ruxton. Perhaps I should not have told him my story after he spent a day of listening to other, more polished stories.
I tweaked the definition of ‘world’ slightly and used Mickey’s world – his livelihood on Ruxton Island where he has made his home his entire adult life, as the ‘world’ that gets ruined by the evil contained in a story. Ruxton island gets burned in the story as a way to show the consequences of the evil that can inhabit stories. A life and a place get ruined together.
I told Mickey that I was making a story with him in it, but he has not heard it yet. In reality, he is not the man portrayed in my story, though he does run a bed and breakfast from Ruxton Island.
Works cited:
Keller, Sarah. The Shaw Family Wood Stove. Photo, Ruxton Island, BC, Canada.
“Ruxton Island, BC.” Map. Google Maps. Google, 22 September. 2016. Web. 22 Sep. 2016.
“Ruxton Rental Retreat & Sailing Tours.” Salt Spring Exchange. N.p., 15 July 2016. Web. 22 Sept. 2016.
Shaw, Ljay. Personal interview. 22 September 2016
Hi Sarah,
Intriguing story. It seemed to escalate quite quickly at the end there–stories can be dangerous things! My question is why do you think that the assignment had to have a negative bend? I definitely took my own story in a negative direction, but maybe the fact that stories cannot be taken back could be a good thing?
Thanks for the read,
Michael
I thought that the assignment had to take a negative bend because the original story did and we were supposed to stick to that story. It is the origin of evil – which is not generally a negative thing.
I suppose that destruction, such as that of the destruction of Ruxton Island in the story, can have positive effects. If the island were to burn down these days, the majority of its older inhabitants would not build cabins again, and nature would take over the island from the ashes of the forest.
However, ruining a life is a different story, and even if the character, Gail, had given a positive review of Mickey’s bed and breakfast on some some sort of travel website out of sympathy, the story of his sleeping in other people’s beds would still be out in the world. Secrets between so many people do not tend to be kept, perhaps because a secret like a strange man sleeping in other people’s beds would be so interesting to tell to others as a “what I did over my holiday” type of story.
On a different note, the real Mickey was over at my house for coffee this morning and found the story quite intriguing. He agrees that a if something like that happened to his business it would be the end of it. Luckily he is never present at his cabin when people stay there, and he is far from as strange as the character in the story I wrote…. his only quirk is that if I serve cookies he will eat the every single one of them. That is more funny than strange though.