Short Story

It’s 1991, barely a year after the Oka Crisis, and I’m with other Commonwealth Fellows visiting South Pacific island nations.

Even though both of my parents are alive, much of my childhood was spent in a special orphanage

Mount Everest: She was a mother hen and the other mountains were chicks under her wings. – Tenzing Norgay Shimla was where I wanted to be, like nowhere else in the northwest Himalayas – where the houses stood on precipices, […]

    Sunlight filters through the treetops and spills onto our cobblestone road as I roll down my window and let the cypress-scented breeze flow in. Everything rattles inside, including my Cat Stevens cassette tape dancing in the car-door pocket. […]

I would close my eyes and watch the shadows play behind my lids while the vibrations molded and shaped my dreams.

    I come from a thousand light-years beyond the dark twilight of Earth, a planet today corroded by ambition and destroyed by so many shambles and fights over territorial and ethnic powers and other foolishness of the human species. […]

She grabbed my arm and led me through the gathering of people from the slums.

Sáasil didn’t know how to write at the time, so she told the story to María, her mother, in a combination of Mayan and Spanish, and then both of her parents helped her transcribe it.

Today is a rainy, slushy, windy, still-winter grey day, and my mood matches the weather.

No oxys, no benzos, no sleeping pills, not even a bottle of Percocet.

  Vibration before sound, that’s how it starts. You could be at school, at home, anytime, anywhere. You hear mumbling and feel your lips twitch as you mouth words. Keep on your noise-cancelling earphones, never go anywhere without them. Listen […]

  Je nage. Autour de moi les vaguelettes taillées comme dans l’ardoise remuent au vent. Le visage immergé j’expire à fond, faisant bourdonner l’eau pendant que se vident mes poumons. Par moments, j’entends mon gargouillis se répandre dans un écho […]

The sound tech is weaponizing Classic Rock against me – “Start Me Up” by the Stones, “Light My Fire,” by The Doors.

Collier was born a boy, but when I knew him in high school, he called himself two-spirit, fluid.

Franklin drove into the inner city from a middle-class white neighborhood outside the city limits, where his stern Christian father once sold insurance, where home was his mother’s orderly domain.

The snowplow driver was motionless in his seat, seemingly in shock.

The other neighbourhood happening here, on these shared streets. So why do I now feel naked on them?

  Lorsqu’on nous regarde d’en bas, ça donne l’impression que notre vie est facile. On imagine les grands espaces, la liberté. Eh bien, je dirais que la liberté n’est possible qu’à l’abri des problèmes et la seule période sans problème […]

  Talula   Talula, my seven-year-old visitor, meets the ghost of my husband in my kitchen. Her father lifts her onto the bar stool at the counter where I’ve spread out a festive buffet of beads. Lately, Talula has been […]

Fifteen years ago, I would have never even thought of this as an option. Yet here I stand, looking out of my window from my closet of an apartment, and I watch the stars.

And on the second day, God said: “When sadness falls upon thee, eat gluten and eat a lot of it.” That day she ate many pancakes.

For the next six days, we stayed at home, obeying the curfew that gripped the city as the Israeli army stood at its doorstep.

  Municipal Court Mondays were always a low roar or outright chaos. Or maybe it was the other way around as the herd of weekend detainees was packed into the courtroom. The crimes for the most part were of a […]

If I believed in fate as an intelligent force, I would see my relationship with Jay as predestined. From the very beginning Ma Kirton, his grandmother, wanted us to be friends. Not sure if to this extent, but she’s dead […]

    “Sometimes we revolutionaries are alone; even  our children see us as strangers.”– Che Guevara   The “guest speaker” was coming; and the Party bosses were at it again. Hush-hush everything seemed, or sounded. But I also wanted it […]

The knock comes as Ellie scratches at the remnants of a dream. A chilly wind on her cheeks. Moving against gravity high up into the blue, her head tilted towards a melee of trills and chirps. Ellie squeezes the sounds […]

  Cricket’s on the TV. It’s on but you’re not watching. You’re lying on the couch in front of the TV, but your back is to the TV and your face is burrowing its way into the back of the […]

  No, it was not you I was thinking of when you caught me.   I didn’t answer you last night, because to give such an answer is no answer. It merely opens the floodgates to more questions. None of […]

Does she usually read this way? Always in the same room? Is the tiny black object on the trunk (on the steel cabinet) really a bird? Why exactly am I moved by this image? There are 48 black-and-white photographs in […]

  As Trixie and I filed out of the interpretation booth for the coffee-break, a smiling woman intercepted us. Trixie and I exchanged a look, returned the woman’s smile and said hi. She explained that she was training as a […]