Colleen Gillis taught English at Cape Breton University, Sydney, Nova Scotia, and worked as a freelance editor. Two of her stories will appear in the fall 2012 issues of the Windsor Review and Room Magazine. She has previously been published in the Fiddlehead, the Halifax Herald, and Eastern Horizons: New Writing from Cape Breton.

"Their Hat" was published in Eastern Horizons: New Writing from Cape Breton, ed. Richard Marchand (Sydney, Nova Scotia: UCCB Press, 1997).

© 2012 Colleen Gillis

 

            Their Hat

Remember when men wore hats

Not ball caps
but fedoras, stetsons, porkpie hats

They’d come in the kitchen door
take off their hat
and say
g’day missus

They’d sit on a kitchen chair
near the door
crossing their legs
and put their hat
over their knee

You always knew
when they were ready to leave
they’d pick up their hat

stand by the door
their hat in their hands
say so long
put on their hat
and be gone