Fiction

Transcendent Expectation

Transcendent Expectation

“Transcendent Expectation” is the Third Place winner for Room’s 2022 Fiction Contest. Of this piece, judge Shashi Bhat writes: "Transcendent Expectation is a story about a modest prayer on a family road trip, felt deeply by its young protagonist. This piece is...

We Climbed Up Glaciers

We Climbed Up Glaciers

Houses have smells, everyone knows that— mine is musty, mothballs and soup. This house has high arches and walls of windows and paintings of mountains, but its smell is like a new car. Aluminum, and cleaning fluid. Lonely like a showroom. Our girlish voices echo in the gallery.

Your Skinny Daddy

Your Skinny Daddy

Joya Guzmán is a Mexican-Canadian emerging writer and translator at home in northern Mexico and the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Sḵwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples known as Vancouver. Her prose and poetry have been published or forthcoming in Acentos Review, Room Magazine, SOMOS Magazine, and others. Joya Guzmán is a nom de plume.

Issue 44.2 Teaser: Guelph Guy

Issue 44.2 Teaser: Guelph Guy

When they started dating, Almost Daddy visited every month. He picked her up on Sundays after her cashier shift at the pharmacy, at Dundas and Spadina in Downtown Chinatown. She wore the same Niagara Falls coat, layering on a second jacket in the winter. Unlike most refugees that she knew, Guelph Guy had his own car. He’d pick her up and take her on walks by the harbourfront. To feel the humidity of indoor plants at Allan Gardens, to watch movies at the University Theatre on Yonge Street.

A Hundred Unions

A Hundred Unions

For their tenth wedding anniversary, Robin and Yu’en planned a small gathering at The Peony, the Chinese restaurant at the Imperial Club. Nothing extravagant. The first of October fell on mid-autumn, the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, an auspicious day for...

Good Friends We Have

Good Friends We Have

“Good Friends We Have” is the honourable mention for Room’s Fiction Contest 2020. My grandmother said, you can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends, so choose wisely. But I didn’t so much choose my friends as they chose me. At school, we clung...

Wards

Wards

A gargoyle sits at the end of my garden, a plastic resin Mother’s Day present, wrapped with charms of love and my children’s perspicacity. Her name is Marthe and her job is protection. Most of all, she is to guard me and mine from the dragon. A gargoyle sits at the...

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ROOM 47.2 Seedpod
“Maple keys are built by nature like helicopter blades, which allows them to propel as far as possible from the mother maple… In these pages, we see the brave, touching, true ways we, too, must embrace the fear and the excitement that comes with leaving where we are rooted.”

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ROOM 47.2 UTOPIA
Join Room and Augur in the gleaming, unwritten future with our utopia issue. Featuring new poetry by Larissa Lai and an interview with Whitney French.

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