Natalie and her friends wore stiff neon vests like sandwich boards advertising their faith in finding Bettina, the little girl who’d wandered into the bush three days ago. At least Natalie’s friends had faith—this was their second time through the same field because Morgan had a “good feeling”. They were just a few of the [...]
Category: Story Time
Excerpt from Number Six by Terry Jordan
MOLLY stands at a table brushing COLIN’s police dress jacket and pants. MOLLY (to the audience) He was terrible funny with the limericks, Colin was. The scourge of the church, though that didn't stop him. He'd make up new ones every day. New ways to embarrass me, reciting them to anyone, anywhere. Some of them were lovely [...]
“William Head Penitentiary” by Allie McFarland
The picnic table, a husk of cracked, salt-worn wood, brittle onion-skin paint branded by cuss words, its struts bolted to concrete too near a chain-link fence. The lawn runs to the ocean, leaps over pebbles and prairie dog holes to the tide that drags the picnic table toward the cruise ships flaring like birthday [...]
Excerpt from Calvin 13 by Arthur Slade
I turned a corner and got God. That’s how they’ll tell it to the future gens. They won’t say nuts about the smiley smackin’ through my head, that I had to piss. They’ll say I was the thirteen who killed so many in corp wars but cried for the first time in all his years of warring after seeing the perfection of the Monkeyman’s face. They’ll spout that my geneticized heart was opened to love. They’ll write [...]
“A Dark Matter” by Barbara Langhorst
So shy, immaterial, you lit out at night for a climate that knows no change, peeping to the call of winter in Jamaica, first-primed paradise. Now, Swainson’s warbler, spread your wings wide, a better treat than an eagle in the hands of the migrating naturalist, your if-a-tree-falls- in-the-forest rock-a-bye-ba- by song interrupted by glass. More [...]
Excerpt from The Difference by Marina Endicott
Wake up, Kay heard. Wake, wake, wake up, girl, whispering, then a tweedling humming, wake up wake up again, all very soft and almost sleeping in her ear. The air was cool and sweet. She had been dreaming, running along a path after Annie as the dark was coming, and where was Thea? Lost, as [...]
“Making Carrot Cake During the Plague” by Jeanette Lynes
I have no raisins. The larder holds no coconut. No pecans. Drat, out of nutmeg. Short one egg – O, I saw her – Aisle five, the woman who carted Last carton of eggs perhaps In the world. Her eyes above her Mouth-mask told me, ‘too bad, loser, I got here first.’ I do not [...]
“the flavour of change” by Mika Lafond
the land has changed no longer do the grandmothers pick from the wild breast of our mother we no longer move with the season with the herds since Treaty we have had to learn to find value in what the land gives us from this space where we have been placed displaced yet we find [...]
Excerpt from Cambrai by Guy Vanderhaeghe
It was eleven p.m. and the electricity was out all over Connaught. The town lay smothered in blackness except for a few windows where the light of a candle or a coal-oil lamp feebly wagged a flame. But in the Connaught Hotel, John Francis Dill’s room was afire with a grand and glorious effulgence. Minutes [...]
“Proofs of Winter” by Bruce Rice
Snow nothing more as cracks in the walk show through like veins under skin a sign for the kind of intimacy that buries its scars slips beneath the talk talk talk and finds its way a kind of rest like spaces left in the tracks of birds without loss without words [...]
