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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

In the north. In the night. A remote cabin. Quiet. Empty. Or so we thought. Imagine a writer, alone and isolated in a secluded cabin in the north, in the blue-dark of night, struggling with this story. Or—imagine yourself here, instead. Cold and alone in the near-dark. Because despite our best efforts at keeping the […]

There was no great trauma that attended (what some later called) Mary’s descent, unless this counted as one: her husband, taking her for a ride on a camel on their honeymoon in Egypt, twenty years ago, and the ornery, swaggering animal shrugging him off and spitting on him as he struggled to find his footing […]

I You tell yourself the story. You tell it over and over. You tell it until it changes from the lies you like to the truth you don’t. But the tale’s in the telling, after all, and the truth will out whether you wish it or no. II It starts with a tea party. Or […]

Four of us adorn the façade. Two inhabit the kitchen. One occupies every bedroom. One peers from each bathroom. Maja Ave, Jericho, was still finding its feet when we came into existence. Initially, we were louvers: aluminum frames with glass slats that tilted like lips, catching the breeze or pressing shut against the rain. Every […]

The naked man stood in the doorway, eyes unblinking. A portion of the left side of his skull was gone, but there was no blood, no gore. Gene tried to outstare him, afraid to look away, and was about to give up from the pain of the attempt when the naked man began to disappear, […]

I was coming out of the entrance when the shot rang out. To be honest it didn’t ring like a bell, it was a thin sound like breaking ice, like the release of bubbles of nitrogen gas in the synovial fluid between my knuckles when I crack them. I have learned a lot about biology […]