Illustration by Lilian Sim The ropes at the bottom of my macramé pot-hanger are frayed. Not on-purpose frayed. Just unravelling. The fern, the one I planted only a few months ago, is growing more on one side. It greedily reaches for the window even though the sunlight is inconsistent. Today is the first day that […] More »
He did not hate the winter now, for he knew it was merely the Spring asleep, and that the flowers were resting. – Oscar Wilde, “The Selfish Giant”
Nathaniel G. Moore
Each time I visit, he tells me the same thing: “She is small; don’t sit on her.” My brother Jesse has mental problems. He’s twenty. “Time is a sign for some. A policy. For some it means nothing at all. Time is cyclical and behaviors evolve to maintain their biological destiny.” This is a sentence […] More »
Illustration by Xulin Wang The astrologer didn’t look like an astrologer. I hadn’t expected someone so young, wearing a baggy BAPE sweatshirt, sporting Vidal Sassoon bangs cut in a perfect Bézier curve that skimmed her eyebrows. A septum ring glittered at her nose, forming an isosceles triangle with the giant gold hoops that hung from […] More »
Photo by Dimitri Nasrallah Dimitri Nasrallah’s Hotline (Véhicule Press) transports readers to mid-eighties Montreal when weight-loss centres were a burgeoning industry, and “body image” and “health consciousness” were terms just entering the vocabulary of self-care. Muna Heddad, a French teacher by trade, takes a job as a hotline phone operator at meal delivery company Nutri-Fort […] More »
Jerry waited beneath the underpass for Tre, away from the streetlamp’s light. Not many people were about in that part of the city, but he could always take out his phone and pretend to chat if anyone got close. It was cold, really cold, and under any other circumstance, Jerry would have gone down to […] More »
There are bed bugs in my apartment building, so we have to flee, fucking posthaste. I pack my roommate’s cat up in her little crate and hop into my inheritance from old Auntie Doreen, a blue ‘98 Chevy Lumina. We barely make it out before they have the white and blue bubble wrap covering the […] More »
I always knew Elliott would leave. I was never under the impression I got to keep him forever. And besides—I’m not that kind of selfish. Sometimes, it almost felt like I should have chased him away early. Kept him from wasting his time on me. “But what do you get out of this,” I’d ask […] More »
I went over to the house the day after Ma told us her news. Vietnamese folk opera was playing in the background, familiar tales of love, betrayal, and misunderstandings. These lyrical tones and string instruments made up the soundtrack of my childhood. I pulled off my waterproof boots and hung up my puffy faux fur-lined […] More »
Sometimes Sam got words stuck in her head. Tonight she was repeating to herself the phrase, unwaxed thread—unwaxed thread—… The on-call room smelled like two decades of coffee breath. She slipped past its heavy door, her eyes protesting the quick adjustment from the bright fluorescent of the hospital corridor to the on-call room’s dim bulb, […] More »
Nookaa starts her new job in seventeen minutes and still decides to take some time deciding what androgynous items of clothing to wear, responds to a text from her partner to “talk” later that day, and also reminds White Boy #326 where the closest movie rental place is, right on Commercial Drive. In the cab […] More »
The Graceville Motel stands thirty feet from the town’s main road. Its lime-green siding has faded. Swirls of dirt frame the white doors. I can see marks where someone attempted to wash them; whoever it was never bothered with the edges of the doors. It’s like they scrubbed down the middle and said, “Close […] More »