The water was always dark to me. I would stand on the shoreline, bundled in the coarse wool sweater Grandma had bought me at the Granville Island market, watching my father watch the sea. He never knew I was there. Not unless I spoke. And sometimes even still he wouldn’t notice me. He had sold
Slugs. Slimy, revolting, gag-inducing, leaf-and-fruit-munching, plant-murdering slugs! I had arrived at my garden plot early that morning—with the sun only just cresting the tops of the houses to find that a small army of the bulbous black mollusks were advancing through my territory, leaving glistening slime trails crisscrossing the dark earth. How many of them
It wasn’t the shag carpets or the original stove that dripped black grease onto the linoleum. Nor was it the fifty-year-old sliding windows that housed leggy spiders creating webs between the panes and those giant furry black houseflies that hatched out of the walls every spring. It was the view! Through the French doors that
“The ferry’s loading right now,” announces my nephew, Lucas, looking down at the time on his phone. He is strapped into the front passenger seat beside me as we hurtle down the narrow, winding highway like the lead cart in a roller coaster. I am driving as fast as I safely can on the curving, rolling road. A few times I cross over the yellow and white lines to cut a corner but only where I can see far enough
She sat on the cool rail, looking out into the woods on the far side of the tracks. Waiting. It was still early enough that a thick fog clung to everything, as it did every morning in the spring. A breeze shifted the air around her, and she could feel the cool dampness against her
The man does not say anything. He appears to want more. I’m happy to oblige. ‘It’s not hard to find people online, upline, or in plain old real life who will tell you at the drop of a hat that nothing is real. I’ve found the reason for the many reasons they give, the various
Note to reader The following is an excerpt from my historical fiction novel, Love Haight ‘69. It is a coming-of-age story, set in 1969, about a runaway teen from Canada, living in Haight-Ashbury and struggling to immerse herself in the counterculture scene. A square with hip aspirations, she finds love, community, and a sense of
After two hours on the road, I see the wooden ‘Welcome to Nakusp’ sign. A big blue ‘N’ on a white background. The sign is weathered and worn and very much like how I feel as I travel highway 6 into town. “N” for Nakusp or “N” for numb? It is the middle of September
On the outskirts of the tiny village of Nakusp, in South Central British Columbia, sat an old barn with a gambrel roof. Once, it had been red but the paint had worn off and now the dry, weathered wood was ripe to be remade into chic furniture and sold to the seasonal visitors who
Part One: Arrival Birdy trailed a teabag through lukewarm water. Her granddaughter Missy, recently back from nursing school, held up a large cell phone: on it, a skeleton of a human, its joints lit up like jellyfish. “Osteoarthritis,” Missy said solemnly. “Damage in the place where two bones come together.” Birdy looked out the window
The judge Jam smeared and restless, the judge banged his gavel. “Order! Order in the court!” The agitated spectators filling the pews on either side of the aisle fell quiet. A few more bangs of the gavel because the judge liked the sharp noise. Time to bring out the accused. The courtroom was brilliant white.
Shadows of deep crimson enveloped the landscape, like a blanket of thin fog. All was mostly visible, but the only thing that one could truly see was the neon and faint aura of a single lonely building. A sign flickered just off of the russet-coloured road on which he stood, which simply read “DINER” in
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