Father did not look like himself in his uniform. There was deception in his navy encasing, like the fabric was hiding something. Some accident, moreover, in the cut of the slacks made it look like there were diapers underneath. That couldn’t be right. Was that really Bridget’s father, under those slacks, that jacket? “Step right […]

It began with a tickle in the back of Wong An’s throat, light as a goose feather. She let out a long, rasping wheeze, and would have thought no more of it. But her son, Chen Wei, recently returned from his apprenticeship with Doctor Song in Peking, gave her a long, searching look. When he […]

Crossing through the woods on the edge of the waste ground she heard it screaming in the night and at first she thought it a child or a young woman, in extremis: wordless, chopped-up glossolalia of pain, somehow finding breath to start another shriek even before the preceding had finished tearing its way free of […]

Pot boiling. Vegetables chopped. Rice cooking. Meat marinated. Stream drifts outward from the mosquito screen of the cracked open window of our single room unit nestled in a stray corner of Chinatown, Toronto. Newspaper crinkles under my fingers, ink seeping into the skin in dark smudges as I kneel to smooth out the folds across […]