The Honourable Mention in our Winter 2017–2018 Short Forms Contest. She did her eyebrows in seventh grade, her pubic hair in eighth. By grade nine she had found the sweet spot between total visibility and inconvenient stealth: the downy patches above each temple,...
Our 2017 Fiction Contest Honourable Mention. Dead Amy Amy could be heavy-handed with obscure trends like silver hair or emerald green lipstick but when she showed up for brunch that Sunday morning, it was plain as day that she was dead. She was gorgeous but years...
Our 2015 Fiction Contest Honourable Mention. After the conference, in which we distinguished ourselves modestly on a number of issues – the colonial, the survival, the post-colonial, the post-survival, the structuralist, the deconstructivist, the Freudian, the...
You are the worst waitress in the world. You can’t remember orders, or you write them down so messily that they’re indecipherable. When you try to read them out to the chefs you can’t untangle the scribble, and you have to go back to the table and ask again. You are...
Saul sat almost peacefully staring blankly at the aquarium in the waiting room, watching the neon fish cut their way through the water. When the blonde nurse entered the room, Saul wanted to tell her to sit down. Pour herself a cup of coffee. He knew what she was...
We get to the party. We say hello to our hosts. We take off our coats. The party is crowded. We fight our way through to the kitchen. We load our plates with food. We sit in a corner. There are a lot of people. There are mathematicians and physicists ... We get to the...
The astronaut on screen is crying. From the moon he has finally managed to call his daughter, only her face on the videophone shows no flare of recognition. He’s been gone so long he has become someone else to her. The astronaut on screen is crying. From the moon he...
Manolo called it the Everybody Laughs Scam, but as I approached the couple on the bench I found that prospect hard to imagine. The woman looked teary-eyed and the man had the strap of his camera bag wrapped three times around his fist. Manolo called it the Everybody...
The honourable mention for Room's 2012 poetry contest. At first it’s terrifying, then it’s scary, and finally, it doesn’t matter. But the space between terrifying and scary, well, it can be an inch or it can be miles, thousands and thousands of miles. And just because...
Your husband has the car for the weekend. You need a car to visit your friend in the hospital tomorrow morning and Sunday morning. The hospital is eight kilometres away. Should you rent a car, call a taxi, take two buses, or walk? Your husband has the car for the...