Fifty Shades of Black by Arthur Black

Monty—jungle foliage from sideburns to Adam’s apple.
    And it paid off. I knew my beard was a turn-on the first day I showed up for my bartending job that helped pay my college bills.
    Women dig beards. I still remember that beautiful blonde coming out of the washroom and undulating up to the bar where I was washing glasses. “Are you the manager?” she cooed, sitting down and pointing her cleavage at me. I stammered that I wasn’t. She reached a hand across the bar and caressed my beard. “Oh, that’s too bad,” she pouted, and brought her other hand up and ran it alongside my chin, twisting my whiskers gently into ringlets, “because I’d like to leave him a message.”
    â€œI could give him a message,” I squeaked. I could hardly talk by now. She was practically giving me a full facial massage.
    â€œGood,” she purred. “Tell him the ladies’ room is out of toilet paper and hand towels.”

 
    Canadian Heroes, Subspecies: Unsung
    F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.” Well, I don’t know about that, but I’ll show you a hero. A family of them in fact: the Murakami family of Salt Spring Island.
    There are three of them left, Richard, Rose and Violet, all siblings. They are all getting up there, in their seventies and eighties, but they’ve lived on Salt Spring Island all their lives. Well, that’s not quite true. They spent some time inland back during the war.
    The Murakamis are Canadians of Japanese descent. A 1941 census counted seventy-seven Japanese Canadians living on the island—a substantial portion of the entire population back then. Twelve months later there were exactly no Japanese Canadians living on Salt Spring. They had all—farmers, fishermen, businessmen and their families—been rounded up like Holsteins and railroaded off to work camps in Alberta and the BC Interior. Their businesses, their farms, their livestock, their fishing boats and gear had been commandeered and then sold off to the white folks.
    The Murakamis came back to Salt Spring Island after the war—the only Japanese Canadians to do so—only to find that everything they’d owned was gone. But there’s a word in Japanese— ganbaru —which means approximately “slug it out,” “do your best,” “don’t give in.” The Murakamis didn’t. They started again from scratch and reseeded themselves on Salt Spring. Nearly seven decades after they were shipped away in cattle cars, the Murakamis thrive on Salt Spring. They still live together, Richard, Rose and Violet, in a spacious house overlooking their gardens and Richard’s shop.
    He runs Salt Spring’s most famous auto repair business, employs a half dozen mechanics, most of whom are receiving their old age pension. They all answer to Richard, who pads around his hangar-style repair shop all day long, joking with customers, hauling his duct-taped cellphone out of his overalls to take calls and order parts and generally overseeing the task of keeping most of Salt Spring’s beaters and clunkers on the road.
    And Richard? He answers to his sister Rose, who controls the finances and presides over the Murakami home. Rose is hardly your typical farm girl. She is an author and a lecturer with a master’s degree in nursing and she formerly served as chief nursing officer at the University of British Columbia Health Sciences Centre.
    An amazing family, the Murakamis, about as close to royalty as Salt Spring will ever get. And are they revered and honoured like royalty? By most islanders, yes. But not by all. This ain’t Disneyland, chum—it’s Salt Spring. I’ve heard one islander claim that what happened to the Murakamis during the war wasn’t anybody’s fault, it was just . . . the times.
    So that made it okay to steal their homes and farms and fishing boats???
    The