fiction
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...

Pieces of Me

Pieces of Me

“Pieces of Me” is the honourable mention of Room’s 2019 Fiction Contest as selected by judge Catherine Hernandez. I woke up one morning to bigger breasts. I’m not talking triangle pointies from puberty (which hit well over a decade ago), a few extra pounds from the...

Baby Food

Baby Food

“Baby Food” is the honourable mention of Room’s Short Forms Contest 2018 as selected by judge Hiromi Goto. We called it baby food. We were secretive and gleeful. At fourteen, we’d outrun our periods—literally—clomping down Kimberly Hill with such exaggerated...

They Comes On the Ice

They Comes On the Ice

“They Comes On the Ice” is the honourable mention of Room’s Poetry and Fiction Contest 2018 as selected by judge Zoe Whittall. The day I arrived on Fogo Island there was a polar bear loose in Joe Batt’s Arm. I had driven from St. Johns to Gander, caught the ferry from...

Patchwork

Patchwork

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,...

Dead Amy

Dead Amy

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...

Vagina Dentata

Vagina Dentata

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...

Waiting

Waiting

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...

Gardenia

Gardenia

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...

The Party

The Party

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...