Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt The Gardener Below, leaves rustle and swish. The sound reminds me of an ocean, makes me crave a body of water that’s not a city pool packed with bobbing children. It takes looking at a map to realize Montréal is an island. Pinning my phone to my shoulder, I grip...
Penelope Evans [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]S[/mks_dropcap]ome kid thinks he saw poison hemlock up the trail, a good twenty-minute hike from the cabins. So I’m up there looking, even though...
Reece Cochrane [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]D[/mks_dropcap]ad hauled the family from Chandler to Baie Comeau the day after Duplessis finally died. Good riddance, Dad had said, reading the...
Andréa Raymond [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]W[/mks_dropcap]ith studied slowness, Danny pulls our beat-up white van into the parking lot of Cullards’s Diner, another dubious stop on the Folk Music...
Sarah Thankam Mathews [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]V[/mks_dropcap]ic wants to make brownies but first needs a smoke. You stare up at the bright cliffs of books lining her walls. The ones she’s...
Suzette Mayr This story is an excerpt from “Five Floors of Basement” (working title), a quasi-haunted-house novel that centres on a university professor named Edith who works at the fictional University of Inivea. Her office is in Crawley Hall, a building that produces “sick...
Ambika Thompson [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]I[/mks_dropcap] was making an egg salad sandwich when Charlie called over. I told him, before he could get a word in edgewise, that I had lost a tooth...
Brett Josef Grubisic Please note: The following excerpts do not appear consecutively in the novel. Déviation: Aptitude [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]W[/mks_dropcap] ith the exception of...
Christine Higdon [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]T[/mks_dropcap]omorrow, I’ll be the same age he was when he died. He was ten days short of seeing the first man on the moon. We six were...
Andy Sinclair [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]S[/mks_dropcap]orry for the impersonal nature of this message but I wanted to let you all know that I am making a clean start! Dave and I have decided to...
Meaghan Loraas [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]B[/mks_dropcap]rian is irritated that the television isn’t working. I tell him not to do it but he’s sixteen and he does what he wants. He grabs my broom. He...
He's got one hand on the wheel and the other on her thigh, and Mae can't quite remember but she's pretty sure this is what love feels like.
One ex-wife was looking sexy in a retro green bikini with a built-in, conish bra. She seemed taller than she had the summer before, her legs longer, her toenails redder.
Rachel Charlene Lewis [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]I[/mks_dropcap] keep losing my colouring; I am a blob of human. I should probably see a therapist, but for now I’ll stick to drinking a lot of...
Taylor Basso [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]T[/mks_dropcap]he cab was long gone but they were still standing in the same spot where they got out. Mario had handed the driver a twenty, didn’t even...
Davey Davis [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]T[/mks_dropcap]he Falcon is caged into its lot by prickly pears and a queue of stunted palms. Beyond it sprawl the fallow rice fields, and beyond those the...
Jim Nason Here, above/ cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight. —Elizabeth Bishop [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]K[/mks_dropcap]ent had snuck the tent and two sleeping bags...
Calvin Gimpelevich [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]I[/mks_dropcap] met Gina sobbing on the bike racks behind my work. She paused to hiccup and check her cell-phone display before heaving into another...
