John Van Rys

John Van Rys lives on a hobby farm outside Dunnville, Ontario, with his wife April, dogs, cats, horses, free-run egg-laying hens, and his mother-in-law. When he’s not at home caring for animals, he’s teaching English at Redeemer University. He’s had poems published in The New Quarterly and Dappled Things, and short stories in The New Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review, Agnes and True, and Blank Spaces. His story “Under the Honey Moon” was longlisted for the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award; his stories “Nether Lands” and “Eggsistential Crisis” were both shortlisted for a Word Award from The Word Guild, with “Eggsistential Crisis” winning. His first book-length collection, the story cycle Moonshine Promises, was published in 2021 by Wipf and Stock. John is currently working on a second story collection, tentatively titled The Healing Arts. You can find out more about John’s writing at http://johnvanrys.com/.

An Excerpt from “The Homely Dreams of a SILly Soul”

It was a mid-November Saturday afternoon, and Evan was out in the cold and windy pasture repairing the fence with his youngest sons Max and Arthur. The charger was showing a short in the strand of electric wire, so he had no choice but to shut the horses in the paddock and determine the cause. The last thing he needed was to chase horses around the county.

He’d been shoring up this fence for years. It was in rough shape, the strand of electric wire the only thing keeping the horses from trying the grass on the other side, where it was greener, of course. Wooden posts leaned, held up in some places only by the wire fencing and the T-posts in the spaces between. Horses had grazed the field for a couple of decades, so the pasture itself was in bad shape, the ground pockmarked by hooves having sunk into the soil. Weeds flourished among the grasses. The field was seriously in need of resuscitation. He could hardly walk across the ground without tripping or twisting an ankle.

Normally, he would have checked the fence in the summer, once a month or so. He and the boys would trim down the tall grass growing up into the fence, prop up sagging sections with metal T-posts, replace broken plastic insulators, and cut back any shrubs or tree branches growing into the wire. At least once in the summer he’d call the farmer who supplied him with hay and hire him to mow the pasture in an effort to keep the weeds under control.

This year, he hadn’t gotten to any of this work until now, possibly because of all that had happened — what Evan thought of as a perfect storm. He’d said this aloud twice — once to his daughter Lizzie, who’d been married to Tomás a little more than three months now, and a second time to his son Alex, whose wife Selene ran off with the keyboard player from the wedding band after Lizzie’s reception. Other than that, Evan had kept this perfect-storm thought to himself.

Read more of "The Homely Dreams of a Silly Soul” in Solum Journal Summer 2022.