Poon-Lai jabbed an elbow so her sisters would make more space. The others grumbled but pushed the dog-eared magazine back towards the middle. A British film star grinned at the camera, draped in a five-strand lustre necklace. Black in daylight, lustre shone brighter than opals in the darkness. The most precious gemstone in the world. […]
I watch from across the street as workers gut my high school; the building will be transformed into a brand-new suite of condos by the end of next year. They carry desks scratched with initials and barnacled with gum, blackboards grey with phantom equations and essay topics, and skinny lockers in puke orange and pale […]
The redfish is remarkable because despite the fact it’s dead, it is still moving. Opal, straw flip-flops in hand, watches it arrive. The dimmed, bloated body (once golden, once maroon) pushes itself onto the beach. With one tail sweep after another, it lurches past mangrove roots and driftwood. It stops once it’s struggled above the […]
The movement is unmistakable. Even at the end of the cinderblock hall where the fluorescents don’t reach, I know it’s him. He tumbles in slow motion. There is a soft jingling as he shifts and rearranges himself, replaces himself. He is mis-angled and mangled. I cannot tell if he is moving closer or further away. […]
Before the first word I uttered, before my lips even bloomed, before my brain was anything more than a collection of cells the size of a fingernail, I remember dangling from the hole at my mother’s back, sweeping left and right, left and right, my umbilical cord a flesh-and-blood swing. Mother would sing me a […]
The evening before, Jakub told him, they could be as noisy as they wanted to be. They could drink, sing, shout. Many people even went out into the streets in the middle of the night and screamed, and nobody complained. Nobody got upset, not usually. If they responded at all, it was only to smile […]
“So, is it all coming back yet?” Ursula Crichton’s question snaps Dan back to the here and now. Tires grit on tarmac as she eases the Subaru estate around a corner, a bar of spent sunlight scanning across her face. Outside, brambles and browning gorse overhang moss-scabbed walls. Branches of birch and oak shiver above, […]
For several years, Winnie had been living on the north side of a town where nobody oriented themselves in terms of north, south, east, or west but rather in relation to the sea, the hills, and two rivers, one on either side. One did not, when giving directions, say, Drive west but rather, Drive towards […]
“They say there are only old women left.” Dima, sitting on a stump, dirt and dead pine needles at his feet, hugs his greatcoat tighter around him but it’s no use. The cold is unspeakable. He’s never felt anything like it, would be ashamed to say so even though he suspects the others feel the […]
Today three guests arrived from the sea. I had neither expected nor wished to see another soul for as long as I lived. Yet I made them welcome. I had been sitting above the waterfall, gazing into one of the pools beside the rapids where the waters gather strength for their shouting suicidal plunge. I […]
