David Halliday

• Oct-2023
• 

-One man, looking for meaning within the turbulent times he is living through.-A friendship for life forged between two men as they struggle to survive in the heat of battle.-One woman and an unexpected love discovered in the most unlikely of places....

• Dec-2014
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This children's picture book looks at the negative impact of human actions on wildlife. The wood rat sings a tale of habitat destruction and his quest to find a new home. The book includes the original poem, illustrations, and sheet music for the son...

• Aug-2012
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Its too damn hot. Except in the bar. Where everyone is trying to remember another urge than to drink. And then there are those ready to die. For country. For peace. For anything. But the rats play. And the drugs are dispensed. And loneliness sleeps o...

• Jul-2011
• 

Edwin Drood dies. But why? His girlfriend never understood him. Though she feared for her life at times. His enemies were numerous. But would they kill one of their best dealers. Did he cheat someone in a drug deal? Or was it something else. About th...

• Jan-2011
• 

I met Matthew Chambers in a cafe in a small village of Hamme, Belgium. We talked on several occasions and always I had the impression that he was a man who was being pursued. I knew not by whom. And then one day he was not at the cafe at our accus...

• Dec-2010
• 

A man is dying in his backyard of a heart attack. He begins to recall his life. Except that it is not his life. It is the life of a fictional character from a popular television situation comedy. And he can't....

• Dec-2010
• 

• Nov-2010
• 

A finalist in the 2003 Eppie Best Poetry Collection, Church Street Is Burning, in illustrations, short stories, and poems, tells the story of the poet as a young man. Lost. Abandoned by the woman he loved. Bewitched by the street he lives on. Forg...

• Jun-2006
• 

An old man thinks he is a god. And then he has murdered one of his subjects.

In the western suburbs of Toronto, a small junction called the Six Points, an old man has prowled through the streets forever. No one can remember when he hasn't ...

The 8-bit home computer Commodore 64 was introduced into the market place in January, 1982. Volume production started sometime in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of $595. Dalton Mackenzie bought ...

The moon slept in its garden. Clouds as thin as lace were tangled in the treetops. Bats flickered in and out of the high branches. Down below in the long grass the crickets were too loud. Two teeth shone like nuggets in the dirt. The headlights fr...

I don't know if I said something wrong. But Paul changed. He wasn't the Paul in the club. He started to act rough. He reached for the empty bottle of wine and smacked me on the head. I laid there for a while. Out of it. As I began to come to, I co...

A hit of acid. Wearing rubber boots. Standing in water up to our chins. Laughing our disembodied heads bobbing up and down like buoys in a motor boats wake. Our voices in helicopter laments. Stuck in 1972. Tripping. I wonder why they call it blotter ...

Across the hydro field butterflies, rags of yellow, white, orange, were tossed by the breeze from milkwood to milkwood. Dogs ran free, tearing through the long grass after unseen prey sometimes leaping into the air out of sheer joy. Birds, garter sna...

Greg and Bower were such jerks. Twice they'd been questioned about break-ins at the school. Turning over desks, drawing obscene pictures on the blackboards, spilling the contents of the teacher's desks around the room. All kinds of moronic shit. B...

Sometimes I can't remember what mom looks like. Sometimes all I can remember is her smile. Mom has only been dead a year and her face is already beginning to fade. I have to look at the pictures dad keeps on the mantle. They too are beginning to f...

The Trans-Canada Highway was approved by the Trans-Canada Highway Act of 1949. Construction was begun in 1950 and finished in 1971. Upon completion it was the longest highway in the world. It runs from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. And that's wh...

Someone you saw on the bus everyday. A colleague at work. The choir master. A girl in a brown coat waiting in line at the supermarket. A girl you went out with. Once. All these persons do not make up the core of your life experiences. They are bit pl...

Someone you saw on the bus everyday. A colleague at work. The choir master. A girl in a brown coat waiting in line at the supermarket. A girl you went out with. Once. All these persons do not make up the core of your life experiences. They are bit pl...

Someone you saw on the bus everyday. A colleague at work. The choir master. A girl in a brown coat waiting in line at the supermarket. A girl you went out with. Once. All these persons do not make up the core of your life experiences. They are bit pl...

Someone you saw on the bus everyday. A colleague at work. The choir master. A girl in a brown coat waiting in line at the supermarket. A girl you went out with. Once. All these persons do not make up the core of your life experiences. They are bit pl...

Someone you saw on the bus everyday. A colleague at work. The choir master. A girl in a brown coat waiting in line at the supermarket. A girl you went out with. Once. All these persons do not make up the core of your life experiences. They are bit pl...

Children have nightmares. They wake up in a sweat and cry out for their mothers. A village can have nightmares too. The villagers wake up and cry out for each other. These stories are about that nightmare. Mackenzie Phillips sat up in his be...

The sixties rose out of the fifties with so much hope. Eisenhouer was gone. Kennedy was now. Wrestling was real. The Leafs were winning Stanley Cups. Television was a series of comedies about white kids in the suburbs with skin problems. Or westerns ...

I wait. It feels like my life no longer belongs to me. I wait for Aristotle to go to sleep. I cook dinner. I wait for Frank to come home. We eat. Frank talks about what some kid said in his class today. I listen. For Aristotle to wake up. I smile...

There is shame. Embarrassment. Fear. What if someone finds out.The monster comes home to an empty house. He goes to the attic where he opens a chest. And rummages around in it. He takes out a rope. Throws it over the rafter. Finds a chair. Picks up h...

I was so pleased to be part of this story. Although I do get car sick and the guy driving the cab had two left hands. I mean it. Two left hands. But it was a good group and the story had a nice ending. Not nice in the sense that my character died, bu...

Humans could hear the voices of the men working at the mill in the vale. Or dad singing at Sunday mass. The fluttering of birds in the trees. The stones rattling against the bottom of cars moving down the road. The stone quiet in winter. Except for t...

The Exhibition is a story written like an Brueghel painting. Time turns on itself. Events are repeated and altered. Characters both dead and imaginary appear. At the core of the story is an exhibition of paintings. The paintings tell the story of...

“My name is Freddy or Willy or George. I invented history. Before me it was a bunch of things falling apart. There was no order. Catholicism and chaos.” The story of one of the great mind of Western Culture, Friedrich Hegel, the root of b...

“I was afraid of everything. My mother was always warning me about the world out there. I had to stay close to home. Sandra was also warned but her reaction was different. There are men out there who will do terrible things to a little girl, my...

A moment caught. An angry aside. Two people glance at each other on the subway and never see each other again. A piece of conversation drifting passed. A question is asked. But no answer is heard. The wreckage of time and space. The frightened look. ...

I don't know how stories are supposed to end. We are in the midst of our lives, when life seems to drift on without us, fading away into the future. Nothing ends. Things dissolve into a new story, someone else's story. What happened to Mackenzie P...

I am losing my voice. Words. Vocabulary. I am forgetting what things are called. 'Thing' is my go to word. It is not Alzheimer. It is something else. Something worse.My skin is getting looser. Sometimes I'm afraid that while I'm showering it will sli...

""I can hear her coming. A powerful roar from a great distance. , Her craggy pot-marked face smoking, the long tail of fog trailing behind. She will come tumbling toward us like a snowball of fire hurled by a spiteful Santa Claus. Her voice. Not so"...

The stain on the cement stared back at me. I wanted to go home and get a pail of hot water and wash it off. Several ants were grazing on it. I looked around. Everything was the same as it had been a few days earlier. The telephone booth. The newspape...

I was born in Reykjavik. When I was four, we emigrated to Manitoba. We moved to a farm near Gimli Manitoba. Home of the three Viking graves. No one is sure how they got there but I'm confident they didn't take Air Canada, as we did. We lived on Sixth...

I wanted to believe in something. I prayed. But all I could hear was the echoed clang of a clapper against a bell. The bell ringer was dead. The universe was empty… I was the miserable beggar on the street, my palms slashed red with the cuts f...

I have these awful thoughts. In the middle of the night. When I can't get to sleep. Like a slide show. The planet. Devastated. Hardly a sign of life except for the odd building on the landscape. And the sky is a deep purple. Silver clouds drift by...

I can never sleep. Soon as my head hits the pillow, my brain turns on. Ideas. Things that you can never imagine yourself thinking. For months I used to worry about my airplane. There's a small airport near the trailer where people land small aircr...

Its odd being dead. Not what I expected. Like waiting in a doctor's office. Reading old magazines. But I'm here for a purpose. To help Sam move on. That's my husband standing there next to the compost looking at his pipe. Sam. It's gone out again....

Most of the time I feel hollow. There is no real me. Like an open window the wind blows through. And that is what the night is like. The noise lowers. I feel peaceful. Out of time.Winter is nirvana. The burb is bright with the snow on the ground and ...

I was born during the opening credits of a movie. A monster movie. Not born in the theatre. Born in the movie. My mother was fleeing some kind of disaster. She had me. I cried a lot. It was my first speaking part. Then my mother buried me in some ree...

The rain was black. Glistening asphalt like an engagement ring. Moon shattered in the puddles of shame, shards in the faces of pools. Motor oil slicks, cheap impressionistic cringes. Two dancers, Everest and Edna McGuire. The gentleman wore white...

There is a special place in hell for mothers. It is on Earth. Doreen Henderson lingered for months in a dark place few could understand. The psychiatrists called it post-traumatic syndrome. A young woman, the widow slipped into middle-age over nig...

What is the question? Why do we ask? If a tree falls in the middle of the forest. Where are the corners in the oval office? What does it mean to be a human being? Does the question matter? If left alone would the accountants take over?“We have ...

Sometimes I can't remember what he looked like. Before my mom died. He seemed stronger back then. Taller. It's like when my mom died something inside my father caved in. Waking up, I can hear my old man downstairs. He's been up for hours. Don't th...

""Charlie. I can hardly believe it's you. How long has it been?"I can't remember that far back. Not since the shock treatments. As you can see, I got over my phobias about telephones. If I'm going to get cancer from Ma Bell then bring it on"...

""Trust me, Father, God hates me. He tried to kill me when I was born. My head was too big and my mother almost died. They had to use clamps on my head but the clamps broke so they cut into my mother's bones. It was a real mess. The doctors figured"...

It is the landscape of Eliot and Pound. Uppers and blue pills. Snow drifts and psychiatric hospitals. Streetcars and shock treatments. A delusional young woman boards an airplane hoping to escape the horrors of this world. Some time during the fli...

There was a white van. Inside were four bank robbers. Next door to the bank was a restaurant. A pregnant woman worked in the restaurant. She was the wife of a detective. Outside the window she could see the snow continuing to fall. There were two thu...

Charlie laughed. "I was institutionalized a few times."Insane asylum."A hospital. They say that I was wired wrong. They put me on different drugs trying to set me right. Sometimes they worked. For a while. Sometimes they didn't work...

The Trailer is a novelette, Part of a multi series of books under the banner THE INVISIBLE MAN. This story concerns a retired cop who now works as a crossing guard and has become the object of two students' school assignment. They want to mak...

Scientists now believe that the virus was present decades earlier, in the 1950s. in the flight to suburbia and the mass introduction of television. Tittering had slipped into the modern consciousness. Memories were now harvested to sell everything fr...

It's a good place to think. The bench. To mull over ideas. That's my madness. Everywhere I look I see patterns. Patterns are someone's idea, someone's creation. Order is recklessly rearranging the furniture around us. Old buildings being replaced...