It is 11:32pm, and a mob gathers outside my house. It is a crowd made of mostly people from my village—the ones with clubs, sticks, and brandishing machetes with which they scrape the concrete floor of my compound, generating grating noises—and street touts that have come with jerry cans of petrol and disused tires to […]
Sin was a summer ghost, born of a death sudden as lightning. They slipped on bare ghost soles down the long corridors of an old inn deep in the forest, drifted and danced in the abandoned heft and dust-limned dim of the inn’s pillared halls. With ghost vision, Sin could see the many lanterns, persimmon […]
1 On the final day of his life, Lucien Halcomb’s cancer began to speak to him. “Lucien,” it said, with a voice like clotted blood and fevered nights, “I should like to leave you after all of this is over.” A month ago Halcomb had declined the various offers of palliative care available to him. […]
The river of night settles in my thighs waiting for your tongue. It knows your patterns, your timings, knows the hour is always seeking you. You cum at the witching hour—always, a booty call is my body to collect the spam of your illicit desire to be with someone. Your satisfaction is always the end […]
There is no one here, no one but me. Out of ninety apartments—ten in each of the nine floors—only mine has someone inside, but most have already been sold. It’s an investment, the estate agent told me when I was signing the contract. An investment for life. Yet I had no interest in becoming a […]
You can get to the wendigo on the Blue Line; I usually catch it at Lake & Hiawatha. It’s a slow ride out past the weather-beaten grain mills with the faded murals, the trumpet vine over the fences by the new condos, the sea of white gravestones across from Terminal 2-Humphrey. The riot of green […]
Randall left work early again, feeling ill. Nothing definitive, a general fatigue, a general malaise—that was the word, although he’d never used it before. If he’d stayed in his chair another minute it would have required an army to get him out. He didn’t know where he belonged, but he didn’t belong there. The bus […]
There is a jumbie on the Stretch. Someone will bring it up whenever there is an accident, or a flat tyre or a cracked windscreen. Prayers would be said before getting onto the roadway at night. Drivers strung rosaries from their rear-view mirrors alongside red and black jumbie beads and blue maljo bags. No one […]
To Whom It May Concern: I’m writing to inform you that I have recently moved into ____ House. I apologize for being circumspect about the name. I should probably just spit it out to make all of this easier, but what with copyright laws being as they are, it feels safer if I leave that […]
For years, I have drowned in everything but water. In oil. In petals. In the thick, golden coat of honey. In Helene’s coarse, almond-scented hair. In the scattering of her clipped fingernails she left on the bathroom counter as yellowed half-moons. Those shed parts she sloughed off and left for me to find when I […]
