For A.M. In the months before her blindness, she spreads out the photographs of her family on the top of her formica coffee table. The faces of her children, her grandchildren, her sisters, brothers, nephews, grandnephews, cousins, friends, and long-dead husband seem to float on a film of unfocused light. Like holographs, like weightless amoebas… Read more »
Saturday is the day for chores. Cleaning out the garage, I find the cause of the foul smell that’s been wafting into our living space for the past couple of weeks. There’s a dead rat wedged in a narrow space between two crumbling cardboard boxes filled with old baby clothes and record albums. When I… Read more »
Have you ever wondered about those pieces of petrified wood they sell in tourist shops beside the boxes of incense and the Yanni CDs? If not, you really should, because they’re one of Nature’s great pieces of trickery. What happens, you see, is that a tree dies, let’s say on the edge of a swamp,… Read more »
In disobedience to the Will of God, the Mischievous Woman plucks an apple from the forbidden tree, polishes it on her bare arm, takes a big bite, hands it to her boyfriend. Suddenly, the garden changes. There are big black beetles in the shrubbery, wicked looking fish in the pond, snakes in the hedgerow. When… Read more »
It’s the last week of school vacation, and we’re spending it on Mayne, the smallest of the Gulf Islands. We’re camped on a low bluff overlooking the waters of Active Pass. We’ve been here for about a week, and have fallen into gloriously lazy daily rhythm. In the morning we make thick black coffee and… Read more »
still life with avocadoes dogs at the door of the bungalow drawn by the heat of conversation the untouched bowl of avocadoes sitting on the kitchen table whiskey-fuelled and reincarnated two lovers naked in their history after years and too many conquests after too many wars waged with themselves they return to the scene of… Read more »
Way past midnight on a moonless highway half way through Saskatchewan, headed back from a funeral, and the radio is playing a ballad by Journey or Air Supply. Probably the reason why some genius invented push buttons for car radios. Further down the dial a solemn CBC host interviews a man who has written a… Read more »
One day I was volunteering in my daughter’s kindergarten class, watching the kids doing “show and tell”. Of course, there were the usual Barbie dolls and stuffies and flashing magic wands. One kid, though – a chubby girl with spiky red hair and thick black-framed glasses, orthotic shoes and an elfin grin – had brought… Read more »
For a summer job after grade eleven, I worked the graveyard shift bussing and washing dishes at an all night diner in Vancouver’s West End. On Friday and Saturday nights it was packed from midnight to sunrise, and at two or three in the morning it was possible to see every form of nocturnal human… Read more »
It’s one hour before dawn and the wind is blowing in from the east. It ripples the great black belly of the Fraser River and rattles the windowpanes of abandoned warehouses. It picks up leaves and plastic bags from a desolate soccer field. It moves the ancient wooden swings in a school playground, making them… Read more »