Our 2026 Fiction Contest is judged by Terese Mason Pierre!
Terese Mason Pierre (she/her) is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in The Walrus, ROOM, Brick, Quill & Quire, Uncanny, and Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, among others. Her work has been nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, Best of the Net, the Aurora Award, and the Ignyte Award. She is one of ten winners of the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize, and was named a Writers’ Trust Rising Star. Terese is an editor at Augur Magazine, a Canadian speculative literature journal, and co-Director of AugurCon, Augur‘s speculative literature conference. Myth is her debut poetry collection, from House of Anansi Press, and she is the editor of As The Earth Dreams, an anthology of Black Canadian speculative short fiction. Terese lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
Whether you’re looking for inspiration or a good read, enjoy this excerpt from Pierre’s short story “A Fair Assessment” from As the Earth Dreams.
___
I learned of my great-grandmother’s existence two hours before I met her. My family spent March break in St. George’s, and we drove around the island in my parents’ all-wheel-drive Jeep. They’d dumped my brother and me at Diana’s house in St. David’s on their way to see friends in Grenville, farther north. I had no idea where these places were at the time, but I didn’t protest the shepherding. I loathed when I had to step out of their air-conditioned vehicle and into the blistering heat, or worse, the rain.
Diana’s house was yellow, a colour I was embarrassed by, but I could admit, even at eight, that it was a me problem. Secretly, I was impressed that a great-anything of mine was still alive.
The first thing I noticed about Diana was that she was popular. Over the course of my nine-hour visit, there was a constant parade of people in and out of her home. Most left gifts and stayed for conversation, and their speech was so accented, so warbled with laughter, I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Her neighbourhood was active, community consistently lurking around every corner. I didn’t know if I preferred it to Toronto’s iciness, which I gleaned sharply, even as a child.
While I was there, my great-grandmother tried to educate me. She handed me her copy of The Student’s Companion, a book orange and sweet-smelling from aged pages. I did not come all the way here for more school, so she gave up, but I did spend an hour flipping through it, lying on her bed with the fan in my face, while my brother watched television and chased stray cats and snakes around the yard. The book was filled with a brand of trivia and general knowledge I didn’t think I had a use for, but my favourite part ended up being
the section on collective nouns for animals. I learned that a group of starlings was called a “murmuration,” a group of hippopotamuses, a “bloat.”
Diana asked me, some time later in the lull between visitors, to sit outside with her on the bench in her backyard. I was confused but did as I was told, heaving myself down dramatically. She held my hand. Her skin was soft and papery-smooth. I couldn’t remember if she was wearing a ring. Whenever I tried to start a conversation, she pressed her finger to her lips, then to her ear. The wind sounded like rain through the palms, which also sounded like cars over gravel; the chickens and goats of her neighbours—and her neighbours too—had their own meandering, musical tête-à-têtes; the dogs ran and barked in the street; Diana’s breathing was wispy but steady, and my own was loud with barely contained verve; we were too far away from the ocean to hear it, but from her house, we could see it in all its glorious, cerulean danger. We named all the sounds we heard and the things we knew were there but that we could not hear. I asked her if she did this every day.
“I talk to a lot of folks,” she said. “Some here, some elsewhere. Listening helps, not speaking helps.”
We sat quietly for a few more minutes before I grew restless again.
I had been wearing shorts because of the heat, and I could tell she wasn’t pleased about it. She pointed to a mark on my exposed thigh and asked if I had burned myself. I told her it was a mark I’d had since I was born. She pointed to an identical one on her face, which was a half-shade lighter than her skin—something I had noticed immediately upon meeting her but did not bring up.
It was the most excited I’d seen her, and her eyes welled up, as if she’d been waiting for this moment her entire life. She did not explain further. She held out her fist and asked me what my favourite flower was. I said tulip, and she when she opened her palm, a tulip bud appeared. Inside the tulip bud was a second, smaller, tulip bud—out of place, but perfect.
I’d thought this was a cool trick, and did not ask how she’d done it, remembering what every single birthday party magician had told me prior. When I saw her later in the day, she seemed brighter and more relieved, thanking her neighbours effusively, laughing a little louder than before.
Later, by the time I thought to reach out for her, she was gone.
___
The winners of the 2026 Fiction contest, as decided by Terese Mason Pierre, will be announced later on in November.
