This weekend I took the train to Ottawa to visit a good friend, who also happens to be someone for whom I have the pleasure of editing. (Woohoo, I can claim my ticket!) More and more I’m enjoying travelling by train (especially if I have no one next to me, like this time, both ways), …
Category Archives: fiction
A Little Night Music
Listen: Across the water, in the distant dark punctuated by cricket chirps and softly babbling water, a faint chorus of boisterous voices sings Happy Birthday. Their cheers echo at 11:18 pm. Wood smoke in the cool air and all you see is sky.
Getting Nowhere Fast
I just realized why I can’t ever say no to freelance jobs and yet more work, even though I complain I never have enough free time and I resent every minute I feel I’m obligated to keep my workday going when I’d rather be doing something else (and even though the money isn’t making us …
Green Tea
She can’t help it. She likes to spy on the neighbours. Ever since her husband bought her a telescope, she’s been unable to keep it from being focused on the houses down the street. He doesn’t know of course; she doesn’t do it when he’s home. In the morning, she turns on her computer and …
Nighthawks at the Diner
It’s 3 am and he still hasn’t fallen mercifully asleep, not even after the sleeping pills and glass of too much brandy. The numbers on the clock beside him glow too brightly for sleep, and he decides, looking around the room and craving company, to go for a drive. He steps out of bed, throws …
Boy
She is his first girlfriend. In the morning, he showers longer than he used to, plans his clothes with better care, turning up the collars of his golf shirt, spritzing on cologne. He remembers to brush his teeth now after breakfast. At school he holds the door, her books, her lunch, her hand. He sits …
Encounter
At the bus stop, she sees him again. Every day she passes him, his strange clothes, his wind-blown sandy hair and startling eyes the colour of moss. And every day he catches her glance, then looks away, an act that both discourages and compels her. The pounding of her heart tells her she is on …
Chameleon
She does not stick out. A chameleon, she can—and not even on purpose—blend in, adapt. It’s no defence mechanism—in fact, she despises how easily influenced she is, how easily, passively persuaded she is by all she observes. But she accepts it nonetheless. This is how she learned to stop trying to label herself, stop trying …
Ending
Torrential rain batters the windows of the café in which she sits, further darkening the interior. Across grim skies thunder rumbles ominously, an ongoing symphony of pathetic fallacy. Damp weaves himself in and out of the café’s various nooks and crannies, past posts and chairs to settle at her table. The air is humid. One …
Day One, But I’m Not Counting Any More
So yesterday my younger, wiser sister wrote to me: “Inspiration doesn’t just come out of nothing. It comes as you stumble across something that maybe you did by mistake, but always as coming out of something you were actually already doing.” Of course. I knew that. But still. And then today Bretthead commented on the …