Getting to the Heart of the Thing

A Conversation with Canisia Lubrin

Canisia Lubrin

is the author of five books: the poetry collections Voodoo Hypothesis (Buckrider Books, 2017), The Dyzgraphxst (M&S, 2020), The Wail (M&S, 2025) and The World After Rain (M&S, 2026) and a work of fiction, Code Noir (Knopf Canada, 2024/ Soft Skull 2025). 

TALI VORON: In your short story “How the River Swells” from your new book Code Noir, the narrator says, “It was grief that would make me a writer.” Can you share what has made you a writer?

CANISIA LUBRIN: I don’t think that there is a single sound bite for the very many things that go into a writing life. The writer as a persona comes with many fables, many myths, as you know. My whole life goes into everything I write, but without autobiographical interest. It’s true that one brings everything one has to the page to give a record of one’s imagination. I think a great engine for me is similar to that character in “How the River Swells”: grief, but also, and more prosaically, disappointment. Disappointment about the state of things, the state of the world, about the condition of the human alongside, and in almost equal measure, the curiosity and awe that also supports living. There’s a double valence in all things, and the writer worth your time and imagination will seek to listen to that.

TV: You’re a distinguished and celebrated poet, and your first two books were poetry collections. Can you share a little bit about your practice as a poet?

CL: My practice as a poet is to be attentive to the force of language and how it reveals the real world. The object of a poem is made primarily of language. And of course you have many other forms of poetry now. Concrete poems, visual poems, and the like. But I work with lexical communication and my practice with poetry is to go as close as possible to the heart of the thing that I want to express. My books of poems are interested in attending to the world and to our being and living in it, and to the many life forms that make an amalgamated experience on this planet.

TV: That’s really beautiful. So, for you, it’s poetry that gets the closest to the core of what you’re expressing.

CL: Yeah. I would say that. It’s at a different, more difficult, more complicated distance to what is being observed. You can even say it is from the inside of observation. A kind of internal art of the human heart.

TV: In reading Code Noir, the poetic voice and quality of your fiction is clear. How and when did you decide to venture into writing fiction? Was Code Noir always going to be a collection of short stories?

CL: I don’t think of this in such a programmatic way. I’m always working with language, and am primarily animated as a poet. In whatever it is that I’m writing, in any form, there are poetics at play—meaning a mode of thought, a structure of feeling, and style of speech. I could probably come up with one hundred different things to suggest, one hundred different origin stories, but the fact of it is that I have long felt both completely at home and almost alien in language, at one and the same time. I have lived with stories for nearly all my life, but I did not know for sure that I would become a writer of them because I happen to be good at many things. Fiction has been a long companion. And what we call form is simply the shape of the thing that is responsible for communicating the standardized behaviour of what is in front of you. What makes the thing a song? What makes a thing a movie? What makes a thing a short story? What makes a thing a novel, etc.? These considerations for me are secondary to the materials of the imagination that I’m putting forward, but I recognize that they are important to how the thing functions.

I found story, or narrative, first. I just happened to publish poetry first. There’s a long story about that and we’re not going to get into it, but I met Paul Vermeersch at a book launch and that led to my first publication being poetry. Code Noir presented itself in the form of fiction. I came upon King Louis XIV’s Code Noir while doing research for my second book of poetry. I used very little of what I found, but I knew that I wanted to return to the king’s Code Noir and to enter its supposed narrative authority with an equal measure of fiction, because those legal codes are fundamentally based on fictions. They are fictions that relegate Black people into abstractions, using ideologies that continue to wreak immense suffering and catastrophe in the real world. And it is not just fiction: it is fundamentally dishonest. I wanted to have the broad and long ecosystem that fiction offers, which is different in terms of that distance in poetry that I was talking about earlier. If poetry is really close, fiction allows you to pull back and see and build an entire world, build an entire galaxy. That is what I wanted to do with Code Noir because that is how it presented itself. So, a lot of my creative response has to do with what the thing is and what form will allow me to express what it is.

TV: And I think with Code Noir being fiction, it offered a lot more flexibility to respond to the original text.

CL: You know, my intention was not to respond to the archival text, at least, not to reinscribe it in the expected way. My intention was simply to have juxtaposition, to have contrast, and a matrix of experience to riff on the actual challenges and mysteries of narrative scripting in the same world as the codes. I did not wish to respond to the codes in a way that would produce a reconstruction of their ideas in the stories. Because our lives and the lives of Black people are way more expansive than whatever narrow, dishonest fictions are in that king’s codes. So, there is no desire to respond to it. It’s 2024. We know exactly what the results of those things have been, but what has been rendered invisible are the ways they continue to influence how the world is today.

TV: You’re so right. “Respond” doesn’t seem like the most accurate word to use. Thank you.

Shifting gears a little bit, Torkwase Dyson’s art is powerful, and incorporates the original decrees in Code Noir. What was your collaborative process like with Dyson?

CL: Torkwase and I had a pre-existing orbit. Our collaboration came out of a conversation. As one does in these contexts when talking about one’s work, one talks about what’s happening, and of course, I was talking about Code Noir. Code Noir was at the very end of the production process. The challenge for the publisher’s team was about how to disturb the presence of King Louis’s articles to foreground the relationship between the articles and the stories; it is one of disturbance. It has to be. Torkwase made those fantastic drawings without any need for a long conversation. The drawings are perfectly right.

TV: Code Noir includes a number of previously published works alongside brand-new pieces. What was the writing process to create Code Noir?

CL: Some of the stories were written more than a decade ago. The writer is always at work. Sometimes things do happen programmatically. You might have projects that present themselves as very distinct and process-driven things, where the form appears immediately. King Louis’s Code Noir crossed my desk while I was writing The Dyzgraphxst, my second book of poems, in 2018, but some of these stories were written as early as 2008. And then came the decision to write a piece of fiction in relation to, or in juxtaposition to, each of the articles of the Code Noir. This book accrued over a long stretch before I knew it would be Code Noir, even though the bulk of the work was written in a brief, compressed period.

TV: I have a couple of questions about the structure of this collection, because that really fascinated me while reading it and I’m sure that every reader who comes to this text, like with any work, will have a different experience. I would love for you to share how you might envision your readers coming to this text. What I mean by that is, for the ultimate experience of this work, how should we be reading it?

CL: I did not include such a note in the book, and I would not dare to give instruction about how to read it now, either. I believe completely in the power of the reader’s imagination and for the reader to be the person who finds their way into the book however they please. Because the book, now that it has left me, is yours. You decide to go with it however you wish. I don’t ever think of the reader as a dial I turn or a button I push. I feel completely confident that the reader will enter the work in the way that the reader needs.

TV: Undoubtedly, a lot of thought has gone into the structure and format of this text. The collection is broken up into three parts. “Part One: Now” feels a bit more experimental, “Part Two: And Then” seems to have more stories that follow the more traditional structure for short fiction, and “Part Three: Elsewhere” is a blend of the two, bringing the reader into the future. How did you structure this collection and decide what goes where?

CL: However you read the book, you get a sense that time is disrupted. There’s no linear time. What I have done instead is focus on how time itself is disrupted by the machinations of our social orders; the way that these laws have influenced the world, and how it is shaped in our imaginations and our stories. So, the book’s movement across time is to disrupt that idea that the past is only in the past and that for some, the sequestering of the past means that somehow we have a future that is completely divorced from the consequences of history. And then to imagine into the future how a different set of relations can occur in fiction. But what I want is to write something that’s interesting and engaging and rewarding for the reader. Readers come to books in many ways, which is why I don’t think it is important to have a singular door into this book. You have multiple doors because I think readers are multiple, but I also think that people have a much higher tolerance for using their imagination than the prevailing systems of the market would tell you. So, the moving through the past, present, and future, is in relation to the effects of those historical decrees. The seeds of these codes are very much alive and well in the over-incarceration of Black people, in the ways that certain urban centres where Black living occurs are starved of resources, in the ways that certain measures of social and economic viability are decided, the logics of borders that say there’s an inside and then there’s an outside—that some people are in and some people are out—and then all the “special” programs to include certain people to give an appearance that things have changed. These ideas are still central to the current world, and if they are impacting the present, which they cannot help but do, then there’s also a future to be imagined beyond this one way of forming what story is and can do.

TV: Building on that, you combine so many different genres and narrative styles in this collection, from contemporary realism to dystopia, futuristic fantasy to historical fiction, poignant microfictions to pieces that read like prose poetry and more. More than that, the effect of reading one after the other is truly remarkable, as it stays with the reader and propels them forward. “How the River Swells” in Part Two reads to me like a work of autofiction, and is followed by “Thing Without a Name,” which is a more absurdist piece. Each story is effective separately and striking when read together. Can you talk about your experience playing with genre and style in this collection, and your intention behind it?

CL: There are many ways that we tell stories and it’s really the mode of the story, and the language that the mode offers, that I find interesting. I wanted to have the characters and their distinct voices and mannerisms and characteristics to be what makes the book come alive. So, if you have twelve different voices, there are twelve different people involved in telling us these stories, and therefore they have their own ways of telling stories. Conventionally, we call this polyphony. Now, not everybody has an MFA to learn the traditional or the standard, or the accepted form or structure of a story—beginning, middle, and end, hero’s journey—and that’s that. Not everyone has that, and certainly, in many regards, those accepted structures and forms don’t ring true for a lot of people. What everyone has, without a doubt, is story and the capacity for beauty and poetry and song and movement and narrative. That is the kind of texture and atmosphere that I wanted in the book. Sometimes there’s a thing about absurdity that can reveal what’s true better than sincere realism. We experience the world in different ways. What might appear to certain people as unreal or even futurist, or surreal—say someone tells you they’ve seen a ghost—are all of what is mixed up in our experience of this planet, of this lifetime, of this time and space. All of these forms of story exist, and I do not put them on hierarchies. I think they are all valid forms of approaching the human condition and human experience. If there is a way to look at that historical document, which makes Black people abstract and homogenizes Blackness into non-humanness, it’s just a singular narrative, which is the master narrative. I wanted, instead, a more vast cornucopia of voices and styles of story. And to have that feel like encountering people out here in real life, as opposed to the archive in the way it is incomplete.

TV: Absolutely. I love that you said you wanted to bring the text to life because that’s exactly what it feels like. The book feels alive, and the fact that you never know what’s going to come next, who you’re going to hear from, and in what voice they will appear is remarkable. I didn’t want to put it down, but I also wanted to stay within each story for a little bit longer.

CL: And those are the kind of reading experiences that I enjoy. I think what we do is project our view or our sense of who might be reading the book, who is the primary addressee. I like to linger with books. I also like to appreciate the architecture of a writer’s work and thinking.

TV: I love the kinds of books that when you’ve finished reading the last page, you think, “Well, I have to read this again,” because you know there’s so much more you can get out of it. And that is the experience of reading Code Noir, at least it has been for me.

The eighth story in the collection, “Via Overnight Mail” is essentially written in a footnote, and the thirty-seventh, “The Boy, the Girls, the Dog, and I Was There” is loosely structured like a play. Can you speak to the role that form and experimentation plays in this collection?

CL: I try to find the best vessel for the expression. I don’t sit there and think I would like to be experimental. That seems weird and like an absurd thing. I simply come to the page with what I have and what is in me. I’m doing what I can do, and I think in a certain rubric it appears experimental. But I don’t have any spectacular ideas about experimentation. For me, it’s about the best expression for the thing that I’m thinking and what it invites me to feel. Form is the shape that allows it to communicate, and story can happen in any form. Genre is a different consideration. Genre is the broad category that has many different modes inside of it, say X number of characteristics then make a particular thing.

So, it’s really about how the teller of the tale encounters the tale and decides to bring it forward. And again, it is about listening deeply and listening to the particularities that people bring to story. If I go to the market to buy some fruit, and I encounter the market woman selling her mangoes and her oranges, sometimes in that exchange the market woman tells me a story.

And then it sounds like something from a sci-fi flick, even though I have no way of actually understanding how this person came upon this form of story. Then you encounter someone else, and they might tell you something that sounds like a ghost story; and you encounter somebody else, and they might tell you something that has the shape and sound of a footnote. What ends up being on the page is made up of what I can make sense of in terms of form

In terms of story, what arrives as experiment could just be the kind of encounter that we have with the materials of each other’s lives. That thing creates these little riffs and pressures on what we hear and what we end up feeling. It’s intuitive for me. And then there’s the question of bringing skill to shaping the materials of intuition.

TV: Code Noir also seems to be deeply influenced by music, especially jazz. Writers, artists, and musicians fill the text, like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Aimé Césaire to name a few. What is the connection between this collection and music? How have other artists influenced this collection and your work more broadly?

CL: I have a profound appreciation for music. Music features prominently in my life, in my process, and the way that I live. I love music and music is a permanence around me. Too, language is also a kind of musical score. When I hear language, I hear music. These writers and artists that you’ve already mentioned are in there because they are Black artists who have had a profound effect on the intellectual and artistic life of Black people, and they have made profound contributions more broadly to the artistic and intellectual life of the world. They are there because they are in conversation in the fictionalized imagination that I bring forward. I put them in conversation deliberately, but it also means that I, as the writer am someone who, just like John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Billie Holiday and Gwendolyn Brooks and Aimé Césaire and Dionne Brand and Christina Sharpe and all of those people who show up in the book, descends from the people who were directly the subject of these codes. And that’s the obvious thing. But there is something to the sort of effect or the emotional scope of any good work of literature that is about the musicality of language itself.

TV: The following line from “A History of Noise” really stood out to me: “She thought about the ways that stories are carried across a perfect horizon by the ones that came before.” What stories are you carrying? Is this the role of a writer?

CL: I carry many, many stories in many, many different forms as I have laid out. Certainly, my grandmother’s stories are always with me. They’re my primary text if you will. My grandmother’s folk tales and folk songs are the kind of exciting, compact, playful improvisational stories that I inherited from living in Saint Lucia and participating in all of these different forms of cultural ritual, and community theatre. The different kinds of stories that have passed through the Caribbean are the rich cultural identity of that place, which is very similar to the way Aesop’s fables, for example, are adapted outside of Europe; this is how African folk tales make the voyage into the so-called “New World.” This is the connection between these two registers of a similar kind of story.

These stories form the foundation of what I appreciate in literature. I’m sure a lot of them are some kind of subconscious bedrock. But there are certainly stories that I appreciate in relation to the work that I did in Code Noir, which includes Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s The Bridge of Beyond, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and Breath, Eyes, Memory, and many other poetry books, films, songs, etc. So, yes, I think you’ve touched on something quite profound with your question about whether this might be the role of the writer—this carrying forth of story. It’s a record of our imaginations, which extends to the ways that we live in the world. The ways that we can read books, for instance, from the nineteenth century and get a sense of what that world was like even though we were not there. That world was for those people living in it. I think there is a carrying forward that happens and you’re perhaps very right, yes.

TV: In “Metamorphosis: 1” there’s a line that reads, “And to undertake witnessing is to double presence.” The artwork corresponding to “Code Noir: Swing” has the words “witnesses” and “memory” boxed in. So much of this collection is preoccupied with actively bearing witness to the past, and bringing awareness to the implications in the present and future. Can you speak to our collective responsibility to bear witness?

CL: If there is a collective responsibility to bear witness, certainly the writer plays a significant role in that. It is the kind of work that being in a social context allows us to do because literature is not somebody’s vanity. Literature, when it really does its work, is angled toward the world, toward each other. And because there is this extended social context in which literature happens, there is this function of witnessing that it allows us. Now, what responsibility is drawn from that is not something that writers can dictate. But I think that is to say your relationship to literature is whatever you decide it is. Writers make books to the broader collective memory, and this gives us a chance to contest certain narratives, especially the ones that are really corrosive: the narratives of tyrants, the narratives of autocrats, the narratives of “winners of conquest” and “us vs. them.” Narrative can have that function; story, and poetry, and all of that literature can have that function. But it’s always, I think, an invitation, not a demand.

TV: In Part Three, there are several stories that are set in the future, including the final story in the collection. What does the future (of writing, publishing, and beyond) look like for you? Or at the very least, what do you hope we’re moving toward?

CL: I don’t know exactly what that is and I would not want to hazard a guess. I’m always writing, so I’m going to keep writing. I think that literature, because it is about our being, is about the dynamism of our lives and the materials of our existence. To me, it just makes sense that it keeps evolving, and that we have new forms of telling stories. It is important that it not be reduced to ideology and propaganda and posturing. When those new forms arrive, they are not necessarily the things that we’re prepared for, but they may be the result of that dynamism and the aliveness opening into new things. For me, the great hope is for that to keep happening and that there’s no stagnation. Even though we’re in the era of homogenized fast food, so to speak. I think above all literature is nutritive. It’s enriching even when it arrives in ways that are mostly very entertaining.

TV: The closing remarks in Code Noir warn to “prepare for consequences from friends, loves, and enemies” after reading the collection. This was a thoughtful reminder of the vulnerability not only of writing, but of making your words readily available for the public to consume. It also reminded me of the questions I receive time and time again from students and new writers, so I’ll ask you—how do you know your work is ready to share or publish? What is your advice for writers who are scared to make their private words, and worlds, public?

CL: I feel compelled to stress again that I don’t think of the reader as a consumer. As a reader, I don’t think what we do is consume literature, in this base sense. I think what we do is participate in a really complex and complicated extended engagement with our imagination and the materials of our lives. Yet we have this structure that reduces that thing into consumption. I suppose it’s part of the consequences of industry, and what industrialization and large-scale production has brought into the life of literature. Because I don’t think of the reader as a consumer, I also do not have this fear of sharing and publishing things. I have confidence that perhaps when the thing leaves me, it will find its completion in the reader. The reader will be the final piece of the structure. The reader will make of the thing what they need at that moment. Like my experience of reading teen books at age eighteen should vastly differ from if I were to read them at age twenty-eight or thirty-eight. And then there are certain books that we read when we’re younger and we gain something from reading, although not entirely. And then much later, if we go back to it, it’s like the book has become a new thing.

I don’t think that books are static things because we are constantly changing. There’s a dynamism to the life of books. So, I would say to novice students to try not to be so taken by this fear of publishing and of sharing your work. You will change as you grow as both a reader and as a writer. Understand that the thing you put out today is what it could be right now, and it is okay to not grasp everything. You must be daring. Dare to express what is true because that is the thing that compels us to take a pen to a paper. We cannot control how people will interact with the work, which is also why I resist answering questions about telling the reader what to do. We can only control the things that allow us to gather all of the bright imagination that we need to make a true sound on the page, and therefore, in the world.

TV: That is the best answer I’ve ever received to this question, thank you. Over the last couple of months, I’ve heard of this idea of picking one word to be your guidepost for the year, which I found quite powerful. I’m curious if this is something you’ve thought about. What would your word be?

CL:I don’t like these kinds of things at all, personally! I’d rather not be so programmatic, and I don’t need these kinds of signposts. I like to be available to what is. I don’t appreciate predetermination. Give me the improvisational, the unexpected.

TV: Can you share what you’re working on now?

CL: Actually, I do have a book of poems coming out next year.

TV: Congratulations!

CL: Thank you. The World After Rain will be published in 2025. And another book in 2026. I am also working on a novel that will hopefully enter the world not too long from now. I have a non-fiction project that is taking shape slowly and I’m enjoying the slowness with which it is coming together.

TV: That’s incredible. So there’s lots to look forward to.

CL: It seems that way.

TV: Lastly, a question I ask at the end of each interview: What is the best piece of advice that you’ve received that you would like to share with our readers?

CL: A couple of things I find true and profound have stuck. And I like to share them with my students. The late Priscila Uppal, a great poet and writer and wonderful teacher, said to me once, “Trust your intelligence.” Just that. And that was exactly the thing I needed to hear. And then in grad school, when someone was talking about writer’s block and complaining about being stuck, Dionne Brand said, “Do not say you are stuck. You are waiting for understanding.” Those are great things that I would like to pass on.

Three Short Interviews with Independent Presses

Featuring Senka Stankovic of flo., Sophie Jin of Briarpatch, and Lisa Whittington-Hill of This Magazine

flo./ Briarpatch/ This

Senka stankovic

is a writer and editor based in Ottawa. She is editor-in-chief of flo. literary magazine, and she is pursuing a master’s in Information Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her work has been published in Room, Common House, and FEED.

FLO. MAGAZINE

TALI VORON: Describe flo. in three words.

SENKA STANKOVIC: Community, creativity, and passion.

TV: Can you tell us the story behind the name? How did flo. come to be?

SS: When we started flo., it was a joint endeavour between myself, Katrina Wilcox, our fiction editor, and Erin Samant, our non-fiction editor and managing editor. I know Katrina through my studies at the University of Ottawa, and I’ve known Erin since I was eleven. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the three of us had an online reading club and we started talking about the possibility of starting a lit mag. And then … we did it.

As far as the name goes, I think that’s probably the least thought-out aspect of everything we’ve done. A big part of our mission statement relates to us being a geographically based magazine, as we’re committed to serving this region. In our mission statement, we write about how Ottawa has three really big rivers running through it, and is the meeting point between them. Ottawa and Gatineau are also in two separate provinces that are essentially functioning as one city split by a body of water. flo. references that aspect, while also referencing how things change and shift over time and that tension of change within the region as well.

TV: flo. is dedicated to publishing works by writers from Ottawa and Gatineau. What marks and makes the writing from this region?

SS: I don’t know if you know much about Ottawa, but it’s known to be quite … boring. It’s a government town, right? There are a lot of people working nine to five. It’s a bit slower, and not much of a party town. That’s not to say that I agree with that statement, but it’s generally how it’s known. Even still, Ottawa is really diverse in so many ways: race, gender, sexuality, and just the lived experiences of the people. In terms of age, based on the people who show up to our events, we have a lot of folks who are younger—some university students, even high school students—and then we also have a much older group of writers who have been really active in the Ottawa region for a long time. Our writing tries to reflect this diversity. We also try not to narrow down what we publish just based on voice, as we’re looking to have a balance of lived experiences. The youngest person we’ve published is seventeen. So, we’re publishing some writers that are still in high school and are just starting out alongside writers that are more established. It’s the diversity in our voices that marks the writing from this region. Now, this is more of an opinion, but I think because it is a sleepier city, the vibe is slower in a lot of ways, and I do think that’s reflected in the writing. We’ve published a few pieces that are focused on the mundane in a way that is very observational, and I do find this to be reflective of the region.

TV: You are both the editor-in-chief and the visual arts editor. What does a day in your role look like?

SS: I will mention that this is a side hustle for everyone on the team. I’m currently doing a master’s of Information Studies. Katrina and our events coordinator, Maya Chorney, are both working on their undergraduate degrees. Erin is doing a master’s in Comparative Literature and Jen is also doing a master’s in English. So, flo. isn’t the primary priority for us, and it isn’t necessarily a day-to-day role. I usually try to dedicate one day a week to any flo.-related work.

My role as editor-in-chief is very functional. I’m doing all the small things that have to happen to keep the magazine running. I have spreadsheets looking at all our finances and make sure that we’re not overspending. We recently got a grant from the Ontario Arts Council, so we’re really trying to stay on top of following the budget that we set out in the grant application. I’m also working on grant applications so that we can continue paying our writers at market rates—and the only reason that we can do that is because of the Ontario Arts Council. I also update the website and answer emails, and I do all of the order fulfillment, too.

I’d say the visual arts editor role is more of the fun one for me. We publish two print issues per year and each issue features one artist throughout. As the visual arts editor, I select the artist. While we have an open call for submissions for the writing we publish, we don’t for art. I tend to select artists whom I’ve seen on Instagram or have met at art events in Ottawa. I actually did my undergraduate studies in visual art, so I have a network of connections through that. I generally have an idea of who I want to feature in each issue and the feature also includes an interview with the artist. I also do the layout for the magazine, and I manage the whole printing process. So I do a lot of work with the visual aspect of the magazine, but also a lot of small, technical things. Before we started the magazine, I don’t think I ever would have thought of these tasks as something that had to be done.

TV: What is one thing you wish all readers knew about flo.?

SS: I wish all readers knew that we actually don’t really know what we’re doing, and we’re just figuring it out as we go! We started the magazine in September 2021, so almost three years ago now. We were three students who wanted to do this thing, but we didn’t know how to do it. There was a lot of Googling and asking ourselves: How are we going to figure this out?

Also, something I’ve picked up on in lit-mag culture is the weird power dynamic of the editor selecting the pieces. And yet, we’re all also participating in it and actively sending out our own writing and getting rejected all of the time, too. We’re selecting pieces not only based on their quality, but also based on how they fit in the magazine, how they respond to the theme, and how they work with the other pieces in the issue. We’ve been in the hard position of needing to reject an amazing piece because it wasn’t a fit for the issue. I want everyone who submits to us to know how much we appreciate them sending us their work and to not interpret a rejection as a sign that they shouldn’t keep writing or that they shouldn’t keep submitting to magazines.

TV: What can you tell us about your most recent issue?

SS: We recently released Issue 5 on the theme of movement called “Sojourns and Odysseys.” We wanted to take movement as getting from point A to point B, so there are a few pieces about travelling. Then there are a couple of pieces on public transit. I really enjoyed putting that issue together and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

Our next print issue is coming out in the summer. Our fiction editor, Katrina, selected the theme for it: “Summer Camp”! We’re really going for writing that reflects that summer energy. Feelings of nostalgia, lakes and sunburns, ghost stories and stargazing … we’re open for submissions until the end of May, and more information can be found on our website: flolitmag.com/submissions.

sophie jin

is the interim editor of Briarpatch; they were part of the editorial collective for both the National Magazine Award-nominated Prison Abolition Issue and the Disability Justice Issue; and they have written for Briarpatch, the Sask Dispatch, This Magazine, the Monitor, and more.

briarpatch magazine

TALI VORON: Since its inception as Notes from the Briarpatch in 1971, Briarpatch Magazine has had a long history of using the written word as a tool for advocacy and fighting for justice. What responsibility do you believe that magazines, and journalism more broadly, have for creating change?

SOPHIE JIN: I feel that this has become obvious to me during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, especially now. It’s the differences we’re seeing in the way the media reports on certain incidents, while people on the ground are livestreaming what’s happening. We see the discrepancy. I think we, at Briarpatch, have a responsibility to tell stories from the perspectives of people who are most affected. In this way, we have the opportunity to map a better future.

TV: Briarpatch is described as “Fiercely independent and proudly polemical … offer[ing] original reporting, insight, and analysis from a grassroots perspective. As a reader-supported publication, Briarpatch is not just devoted to reporting on social movements—it’s committed to building them.” This is a noble and imperative mission and one that, I’m sure, has not come without its challenges. What challenges have you faced during your time with the magazine, and how have you overcome them?

SJ: It’s a really good question, especially as we’re seeing the cuts happening in Canadian media right now. It’s very difficult to remain a non-profit, fully independent, reader-funded magazine. One of our main challenges is that the cost of printing has gone up exponentially. We want to keep bringing the same strong reporting and analysis to readers, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do so. We’re really lucky that over the last fifty years our community of readers—that started in Regina—has grown and allowed us to expand to a nationalmagazine through their commitment and financial support. People really want to see Briarpatch alive. There is a hunger to hear from organizers and people who are trying to improve the world. Briarpatch is one of the few places where you can publish more fiery, political work, like Rehab Nazzal’s photo essay remembering Palestinian martyrs and former Global News journalist Zahraa Al-Akhrass’s essay on mainstream media’s pro-Israel bias.

We also face the challenges of funding and staying afloat. We have the typical challenges of being non-profit like small staff—we’re only two people—and wishing that we could pay writers more, while also keeping everything accessible, and free online for readers. We want more people to get their news for free, rather than locked behind a paywall. We’re grateful for our readership, our writers, illustrators, and everyone who contributes to Briarpatch that sustain us.

TV: What is one piece from a past, current, or forthcoming issue that you call essential reading, and why?

SJ: We published a piece in our March/April issue on anti-hate and political policing, which I would call essential reading right now. It speaks to how the police are using this anti-hate framework to crack down on Palestine solidarity protests and solidarity with Palestinians, claiming that they’re hateful, and charging people with hate crimes. I think the author does a really amazing job of cutting through all the noise, digging deep into where anti-hate policing comes. It also touches on the impact of anti-hate and political policing on trans and queer solidarity in the G20 aftermath, and really dives into the history as a way to show us that anti-hate is actually not a friend of the left. It’s a really smart way for the police to crack down on leftist movements, and I feel like it’s really important that we know that as we continue organizing for Palestine.

TV: What is one thing you wish all readers knew about Briarpatch?

SJ: I want everyone to know the origins of where we started. Briarpatch was started in Regina by a group of people on welfare. It was by and for people on welfare in Regina; it was a truly community-based magazine. I think that knowing those origins is really important to understand the kind of community that we want to create with Briarpatch. If this is your first time pitching to a magazine and you have a solid idea on organizing something that hasn’t been written about before, we want to work with you. We work with seasoned journalists, but we’re also really eager to hear from people who have never been published before, who otherwise maybe wouldn’t find a magazine that’s good fit for them, or an editor who’s down to work with a first-time writer. We think that’s where the most interesting stories come from.

TV: What can you tell us about your next issue?

SJ: In our July/August issue, you can look forward to reporting on Indigenous resistance to silica sand mining in Manitoba, the fight against the far right in Vancouver, and more reporting on Palestine.

Lisa Whittington-Hill

is the publisher of This Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Longreads, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Hazlitt, Catapult, and more. In 2022, she was nominated in the Personal Journalism category at the National Magazine Awards for her piece “OCD Is Not a Joke” in The Walrus. She is the author of a book in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 music series on Beauty and the Beat by The Go-Go’s and Girls, Interrupted, her collection of essays on how pop culture is failing women, was published by Véhicule Press in 2023.

this magazine

TALI VORON: This is “fiercely independent and proudly subversive … a critical, gutsy voice in today’s media landscape.” How do you see This Magazine’s role in the Canadian publishing landscape?

LISA WHITTINGTON-HILL: I love that description of This Magazine. We turned fifty-eight this year, so we are the longest-running progressive magazine in Canada, which is pretty amazing. I think we’re unique in that we publish in print, which sometimes feels unique these days. It’s also unique that we publish politics art, ideas, and culture. We’re pretty wide in terms of what we cover. We’re also national in focus and in readership, which sets us apart while still being very small, and very indie. We’ve been around for fifty-eight years on a shoestring budget. There are some magazines that focus entirely on politics or on arts and culture, or publish fiction and poetry every issue. We have a wide range of coverage and certainly the publishing landscape in Canada has changed so much in nearly six decades. We used to be able to say we were one of the only progressive voices in Canada, and now that’s opened up to many more publications that focus on similar things, which I think is great. More magazines makes us all better.

TV: What is one thing you wish all readers knew about This Magazine?

LWH: I wish everyone knew it existed. When I tell people This Magazine has been around for fifty-eight years, they assume we have much more money and staff than we do. It really breaks my heart when I tell people that I’m the publisher of This Magazine and they’re like, “What’s this magazine?” But you know, when people say, what is This, I’m always excited to tell people what This is.I just wish everyone knew that This Magazine existed and that they read it. I wish everyone would read all the fabulous stories and check out all the amazing writers we publish, and illustrators and photographers. I just wish we had a wider reach and everyone was enjoying This. And I wish we could also do it all on our existing marketing budget, which is very, very small. So, world domination on a very small budget.

TV: What does a day in the role of publisher at This look like?

LWH: One of the things I love about being publisher is that every day looks different. I love being the publisher of a small magazine because you get to do a bit of everything and we only have two full-time staff: an editor and a publisher. So we really work as a team. As publisher, I get to be involved in areas that many publishers of bigger magazines don’t get to be involved in. Like cover concepts or deciding on editorial lineups or looking at story pitches. I’m maybe more involved on the editorial side than I would be at a bigger magazine. I really get to do a little bit of everything because we have such a small staff. I am the advertising department, and the grant-writing department, and the fundraising department, and the circulation, marketing, accounting, emptying-the-recycling department. I always laugh when I go to meetings and people are like, “You’ll just want to send this over to your advertising department and liaise with them.” I’m like, “Okay, great, I’ll just liaise with myself!” I really love being involved in all parts of the magazine and seeing how it all comes together though. It’s certainly stressful and there are long hours, but I really, really love it. I often say I have the best job in the world.

TV: What responsibility do you believe that magazines and journalism more broadly have for creating change?

LWH: I think they have a huge responsibility. One of the things I love about magazines like This is that there really is an opportunity to inform and inspire people to take action and create change. We are writing about issues and communities and topics that people don’t read about in mainstream media. I really love the idea that people are inspired when they read an issue of This Magazine. I received an email recently after we published a short piece on activists fighting for bike lanes in Kingston and someone wanted some copies of the issue so they could take them to a meeting they were having with the Kingston City Council. We’re not just an information source, but a source of inspiration. There is so much fake news out there, and the news cycle changes so quickly that I think that there is a real opportunity and a real role for magazines like This Magazine. We also place a lot of emphasis on working with emerging writers and I think there are fewer and fewer places for that. Journalism is hard to break into, and it’s only getting harder. Supporting emerging talent is a role and responsibility of the magazine that we take really, really seriously.

TV: What is one recently published article in This that you’d describe as essential reading and why?

LWH: I think they’re all essential reading, but if I had to pick one … I was just doing some work this morning on our January/February issue, and we have this amazing cover story that I love and haven’t seen it covered anywhere else. It’s about East African organizations that are working together in Toronto to create a purpose-built neighborhood for residents of the Rwandan community. We hear a lot about the housing crisis, especially living in Toronto, and about how rent is skyrocketing and there’s no affordable housing. Looking at it from the perspective of the Rwandan community in Toronto and how they’re banding together to build this community, support each other, and support refugees and asylum seekers coming to Canada, is amazing. I hadn’t read about it anywhere else. I don’t care about reading about the housing crisis through the perspective of condo developers and how hard they have it. I want to read about how it actually impacts people. One of the great things I love about This Magazine is that we focus on how issues are actually affecting people, rather than just talking to policymakers or politicians. Here we get to read how this particular community in Toronto is dealing with the crisis and how what they’ve gone through, in coming to Canada and in their home country, has influenced the kind of solution they’re coming up with. It’s really an interesting story.

 Bodymagic

An Anatomy of my Integumentary System

Mieke de Vries

The integumentary system consists of the hair, nails, and skin, and is the largest organ in the body. As the first line of self-defence, the skin needs to be able to repair itself quickly if damaged. The rapidly dividing epidermal cells reproduce until they touch each other; thus, a very shallow cut heals within a few days with no scar.

I see Kai on my small, dusty laptop screen. His shirt is unbuttoned, revealing his bare chest and horizontal scars. I am on the couch beside my partner Emily. I feel heat in the triangle of flesh between my thighs and assume I am attracted to Kai. As I watch, I realize I do not want Kai; I want to be like him. My body recalls this warmth: all the “crushes” I had on awkward boys in middle and high school who looked like me—fair-haired and freckled. Kai fills a syringe with testosterone and slips it neatly into his thigh. Could I do that for myself? I could, even though I look away when I get blood drawn. Suddenly, I feel a settling in my gut, and I know I want to magic my own body. This scares a young, childlike part of me who desperately wants to fit in and be accepted. But they can’t deny the surge of embodiment—this visceral feeling of heat in our organs—as we watch a transmasculine non-binary person on screen and see ourselves in him. We sink into the cradle of our pelvis. Our core is incandescent. Our body sees itself for the first time in someone else’s body. Our body is possible.
When I was a kid and teenager, I believed my body was inevitably female. My long, blond hair, skinny limbs, and (when they arrived at sixteen) enormous stretch-marked tits: fleshy evidence of my femaleness. Even though girlhood was a scratchy polyester dress that reddened my sensitive skin, I looked like a girl. My skin hid me from myself. I finally saw myself a year and a half ago, when I went to a barber for a haircut for the first time. She gathered my thin hair into a long ponytail and trimmed it above the elastic. The buzzer vibrated my skull. Chunks of hair fell to the floor until my head was bare. The barber switched off the buzzer and removed the cape from my neck. I looked up into the mirror and saw a man with a shaved head looking back at me. As I left the shop, I raked my hand over my prickly scalp. Cool air cupped my neck. Startling gender euphoria: that corporeal incandescence.
I scratch my skin. It is conscious and it is unconscious. I want to and I do not want to. It is painful and it is pleasurable. I carve a nickel-size crater into my temple. The prickle of pain comforts me. I wipe the blood away and bandage the wound. As it heals, my fingers yearn to pick the scab and I try to stop myself, but I can’t. I got chicken pox when I was seven. Despite oatmeal baths and dots of pink calamine lotion applied by my parents, I scratched my chicken pox until they bled. I produced a scar, a small depression beside my right eye. I stored the scab from this wound in a clear plastic container from my parents’ photography studio meant to store 35mm slides. Also housed within were my baby teeth and a white-blond bundle of hair from my first haircut. I have always been an archivist of my body.
I have an archive of scars. From a hurdle over my tricycle, under my chin. From my chicken pox, beside my right eye. From a fall on a gravel path in the rain, on my right kneecap. From dental incisions, in the wet flesh of my cheeks. From breast reduction surgery, around my areolae and trailing down to meet a curve under my tits. I’m afraid a potential surgeon, some gender gatekeeper, will withhold top surgery from me because I had breast reduction surgery. Because I didn’t know then that I was trans.

A deeper cut takes more work to heal. The first phase of repair is the inflammatory stage, in which blood loss causes clot formation right up to the surfaceof the skin. New capillaries form in the dermis and epithelial cells migrate to just below the clot. Fibroblasts make scar tissue, and then new epithelial cells are made and laid down with extra collagen fibres. Often a scar remains.

I wake in the night with sweat pooled under my tits and behind my knees, torn from a dream of Adam in a labyrinthine house that I try to leave but cannot. I sleep restlessly and wake the next morning nauseous and dizzy. I cry in bed and use voice-to-text to write Adam a letter I know I won’t send him. I need to speak the words aloud. Get out of me. Leave me alone. His presence in my dreams—in my body—disrupts the safety of my recent gender explorations. If (his) masculinity hurt me, how can I want masculinity? But I do want it and I want to uncouple him from masculinity. He is only one man. His version of masculinity is his own. I could be a soft man, like my dad, who was sensitive and introverted and enjoyed scrapbooking, or his father, my Opa, who loved to garden and do calligraphy. I could be any kind of man.
I research gender-affirming surgery and that scared young part who wants to fit in emerges. I try to ignore the vertiginous sensation of falling but I can’t. This part is terrified of us changing our body and they make me feel sick to prevent it. They carry transphobic burdens: they learned that trans people are rare monsters who must hide their monstrosity. They try to suppress my interest in surgery. A different young part—perfectly preserved as his authentic child self—pushes against them, excited for this new idea of changing our body. This part knows no one is a monster. He knows that transness is frequent. He longs to be seen as he is and is sick of the other part suppressing him. He longs to be celebrated, not demonized. He longs for a body that reflects his inner experience. He pushes me to read more about surgery. The idea of phalloplasty intrigues him and I learn that it requires a skin graft to be taken from the forearm or thigh to create a penis. It’s thrilling to learn my skin could be used to make a new part of me. What sort of bodymagic is this? My skin: capable of reconfiguration. Home of my past and my future.
In the winter, I wear as little clothing as possible, shorts and a hoodie and a fuzzy blanket wrapped around me. I hate clothing on my skin—too tight, too itchy. In the summer, I wear even less. I overheat easily and this overwhelms me. I want to be able to take my shirt off when I get too hot. Like cis men do in public places. But not really, because I won’t feel as comfortable as they do, unaware of the space their bared body occupies. Their skin is so unnoteworthy, it is invisible to them. When I saw Kai on screen, usually shirtless, he confessed that he took every chance he got to take his shirt off because he actually felt good in his body now. Confident. As a child and teenager, a male family member greeted me with feminine adjectives, like “Hey beautiful,” “Hi gorgeous,” and “Hey sexy.” Every time she cut my hair, my hairdresser told me how I was beautiful and should be a model and how I must have a boyfriend. These comments displaced me from my body. Recently, I requested that Emily stop calling me beautiful and start calling me handsome. Handsome is something I feel that I could be. When she calls me handsome, I feel that incandescence. I am lit from the inside.
After I write this essay one evening, I dream of Adam again. I see him in a large group of people, and he acknowledges me with a smile. We’re about to talk, then I wake. I feel calm as I emerge from this dream, not enraged and full of grief like before. I released shame while writing last night and feel physically lighter today. My dreams help me understand my shifting feelings toward Adam. They’re a safe space to interact with him, to feel anger or grief or empathy or attraction to him, to feel freely without the judgment of others.
Separating Adam from my concept of masculinity isn’t easy. His masculinity eclipsed my own and obscured more gentle versions of it I saw in other people. It became the definition. Consumptive, selfish, hypersexual, insensitive. Power stolen through violence. When I realized Adam raped me nine years after it had happened, this violence seeped into masculinity. I began to fear all cis men and distanced myself from male family members and friends. Cis men no longer evoke panic in my body. But to be a man myself induces a different discomfort: a hesitation to embody something I have associated with harm.

The integument is an outer protective layer shaping the body. The epidermis consists of various layers, visible under a microscope. The millions of sensory nerve endings in the skin are found in the dermis. Although it is actually through sensory nerve receptors that we feel things, all of this experience of the outside world is mediated via the skin.

With my trans body I performed sleight of hand, illusions, and tricks. My magic was so effective that I even fooled myself. I want to stop performing, but I don’t know how. My transness is not a magic trick, nor is it rare. Being trans is common and ordinary. And I am still drawn to describe my trans body as magical because this word evokes a quality that resonates. Magic is a paradox: holding two “opposing” truths at the same time. Why is my transness seen as a magic trick when the real trick has been hiding my whole life? Why are trans people doubted when we claim certainty over our bodies? Why is our thinking deemed magical, our minds diseased? Transness is whole. My body is expansive now that it has been released from the tight grasp of my younger selves, who kept it hidden for so long. As my body emerges and expands into fullness, I document its everyday magic. My body once protected me and now knows protection is no longer needed.
My trans body is my disabled body is my queer body. Bodymagic doesn’t separate these strands as I have. Bodymagic is wholeness. My illusions of non-disability were similar to my trans magic tricks. I couldn’t see my own disabilities because I didn’t think they were possible—that I was possible. I tricked myself into thinking I was lazy, weak, too sensitive, inherently wrong. I was invisible to myself, my disabilities hidden under layers of masks for all occasions and audiences. The paradox of my survival in an ableist world: I had to hide my disabilities to survive. That survival is disabled bodymagic. When I say bodymagic here in reference to disability, I do not mean that disabilities are superhuman or supernatural. I reject the tropes of the magical madwoman who predicts the future, the inspirational SuperCrip who doesn’t let their disability stop them, and the disabled superhero who overcomes his disability with the help of his superpowers. When I say bodymagic here in reference to disability, I conjure the magic of a body that feels pleasure and pain. A body that I love not in spite of but because the world told me I shouldn’t love such a body. A body that hid itself to survive, that does not have to hide anymore. I conjure gratitude for the days my body feels easy to be in and tenderness for the days it feels impossible to be in.
My skin feels all. Constant corset of clothing chafes torso, socks suffocate toes, a patch of eczema itches, a scab begs to be picked, chapped lips burn. Sun-warmed bare skin in spring, Bart’s fur as he rubs his face on my calves, a hot mug of tea between my palms, Emily’s skin on my skin as we spoon under a duvet. I sink into her body into mine.
My trans body is magical in its everyday materiality, in the same way cis bodies are magical. My body—in spite of everything—persists. I don’t hate my body. I am grateful I have the option of surgery and I fear expressing my gender in all its complexity. I love so-called feminine things and I don’t want to lose them because I am masculine. I feel pressure to morph into hypermasculinity and try to pass as a cis man in order to be seen as a “real” trans man. Simultaneous expression of both masculinity and femininity feels too risky, impossible, paradoxical. The body’s ability to heal is magic: to close an open wound so quickly, to hide itself to survive, to continuously exist. The body’s everyday functions are magic: consumption, digestion, elimination. Transform food into nourishment and expel what is unnecessary. Despite all cultural efforts to dissect my body, I resist. My body will remain whole. Even as I write it into this story, my body defies definition. There is no easy narrative. No “born a girl, became a boy.” My body is one way now but will not always be. I perch on a precipice between past and potential. Skin is a paradox. It conceals us and reveals us.
skinbodymagic
I wish I had grown up as a boy. Because I didn’t get to. It is a loss, even though I never had it. This is the core of my trans grief: mourning who I could have been, and what I could have done, and all I could have had. Before I was born, believing they had created a girl, my parents chose two names: Michael Lee and Mieke. As a kid, I always thought that was strange. “Michael Lee, for a girl?” I asked my parents again and again. I had never met a girl Michael. Lots of boy Michaels, but never a girl. Now, I wonder if they knew without words, saw the me beneath my skin.

Note: Adam is a pseudonym. Headings taken from Holistic Anatomy: An Integrative Guide to the Human Body by Pip Waller, North Atlantic Books, 2010.

mieke de vries

(he/him) is a queer, trans, non-binary, disabled, neurodivergent writer, editor, and musician of Dutch and Danish descent. He lives on the unceded stolen territory of the Quw’utsun First Nation. He graduated from the University of Victoria with a BFA in Creative Writing in 2021. During his time there, he was a student intern on the fiction editorial board of The Malahat Review. Alongside Lara El Mekkawi, he currently works as essays co-editor for The Ex-Puritan. He is currently writing a memoir about his body.

Driver’s Test

Kelsey Gilchrist

I failed my first driver’s test. Spectacularly.
After surviving the uncontrolled intersection and the railroad crossing, the last phase of the exam got me. Mid-parallel park, I turned the wheel in the wrong direction, steering my car directly toward the parked truck next to it. The examiner—a gruff, grey-haired man with tiny glasses perched on his nose—yelped and grabbed the wheel before I could execute a slow-motion crash into the side of the other vehicle.
The moment I surrendered control to him and jammed the brake with my foot, I knew I’d failed. Abruptly, the triumphant moment I had been envisioning for months—returning to the registry victorious, ready to sign my new driver’s licence—evaporated.
I had already made plans for that licence. Envisioned excursions into the city and road trips down scenic highways. The destinations of my imagined journeys weren’t important. It was the act of going—of leaving the tiny Alberta town where I had spent the first sixteen years of my life—that enticed me. Recently, it had begun to feel suffocating. The smallness, the closeness of everything. A driver’s licence was the ability to go somewhere else—anywhere else.
“Obviously, you failed,” said the examiner once the car was stopped.
It was a rude way to tell me what I already knew, but he had been abrasive throughout the test. At the beginning, I’d tried to make a little small talk to break the tension, but he ignored me, choosing to peer down the street instead of replying. And after we pulled away, he conducted the exam in crushing, deliberate silence, punctuated by the occasional sigh or grunt of what sounded like annoyance.
Still, he didn’t make me almost crash into a parked car. That was my fault.
My grandpa and my brother, Paul, were waiting for me when we returned. I didn’t have to tell them I failed; they had already inferred it from the fact that we were gone less than fifteen minutes. Also, you could probably tell by the look on my face.
After we left the registry, Grandpa drove us to the hospice, where Mom had been admitted the evening before. We hadn’t seen it yet, and I was still unclear on what exactly a hospice was. I understood that it was the place where she would stay to finish the dying process, but I was still confused about why it was different from a hospital.
It became clear when we pulled up in front of a single-storey building, which resembled a large country home more than a medical facility. I was surprised to see that it was surrounded by well-tended gardens, and there was even a gazebo and what looked like a network of walking paths extending across the property. We passed through the front doors, and I noticed that the lobby was even more impressive, complete with vaulted ceilings, shining hardwood floors, and plush couches. You wouldn’t have known it was a medical establishment at all, if not for the extra wide doorways to accommodate wheelchairs.
We entered Mom’s room. Never mind—definitely a medical centre. The hospital bed and the big scary machines were a dead giveaway.
My mom looked how she had looked for months now. Pale, eerily thin, and distant—nothing like my vibrant, rosy-cheeked, always-present mother. The distant part, I knew, was because of the drugs, which were protecting her from the pain of the tumours that were pressing on her torso.
When she filled out her end-of-life plan the year before, the nurses and social workers explained that if she wanted, she could refuse the drugs so she could be more alert and present to speak with her loved ones near the end.
Mom laughed. “Why would I want that?” she apparently asked. (I wasn’t there, but she told me the story later.)
Maybe it was selfish. I think it was smart. Every moment that I’ve seen my mother in pain is etched into my brain—each its own trauma. By making sure her last moments were pain-free, Mom saved us from our own pain, too.
When we arrived at the hospice, she was in a kind of drugged-out haze. She gave a weak hello, and Dad leaped up to greet us. Immediately, he launched into an overview of the hospice. Mealtimes, walking paths, call button for the nurses, visiting hours. It was a completely unnecessary amount of information, but my brother and I knew that when Grant was distressed, he managed logistics. We let him continue. He was too busy with hospice details to remember to ask about my test, but that was for the best.
After that first day, we got into a routine. My father stayed at the hospice all day, and I was dropped off by Grandpa or a neighbour or a friend once school let out. Paul flew back and forth from B.C. while he finished up university exams, which he privately told me he was failing one by one.
Spending time with Mom wasn’t exactly pleasant, but sometimes it was okay. She had moments when she was alert and chatty. We talked about normal things—my high school classes, gossip about relatives who were visiting, speculation about who would be cut from the team at my upcoming soccer tryouts. Often her lucidity would end abruptly, or she would fall asleep. Then, the room would suddenly become very lonely.
The hospice served meals and they always had little baked goods sitting on the counter in the lobby. After a few days, I knew the varieties, what time of day they arrived, which kinds were good and which ones had gross bits of coconut hidden inside.
It’s odd, the things that still matter even when death waits so close.
A week into the new routine, I took my driver’s test again. To my dismay, the same examiner greeted me when I arrived.
“I see you’re back,” he said.
No “Good morning.” No “How are you today?” Just that. And I didn’t think I was imagining the patronizing tone in his voice. Not that the examiner was ever not patronizing to me during the brief time we had already spent together, but it seemed to be more severe—and intentional—this time.
I had been feeling some nerves that morning, but they instantly dissolved. In their place, I felt a flame of something else. Anger.
I pushed down the feeling and offered a thin smile. “I’m ready this time.”
Instead of replying, he made a weird smirk and grabbed his clipboard.
No way. I was not going through this bullshit again.
We both climbed into the car. Before I began all the mirror check and seat-adjusting nonsense, I turned and addressed the examiner directly, looking him right in his ugly glasses.
“Listen, I’m a good driver. I’ve practised nearly every day with my grandpa for almost a year now and I took driver’s ed and everything. The only reason I failed last time is because you made me so uncomfortable. Could you—I don’t know—just talk to me about the weather or something while we drive?”
I could tell he was stunned. People are rarely that direct in real life.
The examiner had no way of knowing what I was thinking, which was what’s the worst he can do to me?
A moment passed. Then, to my surprise, he gave a stiff nod. I took it to mean he was agreeing to my terms.
And sure enough, as we pulled out of the lot, he attempted small talk. I made a flawless left turn at a controlled intersection. He asked me about school. I told him about my AP English class while executing a perfect hill parking job (downhill, with curb). Did I play any sports? Yes, soccer, for a club in the city, I explained as I navigated a tricky three-way stop.
We approached the last leg of the test—parallel park—and he asked me about my plans for spring break next week.
“Well, my mom was just moved to hospice care,” I said, in the same tone I used while talking about my English paper. Descriptive, matter of fact, polite. Unruffled. “So, I’ll be spending most of the time with her. She has stage four breast cancer with metastases in her back and lungs.”
I heard the examiner’s sharp intake of breath, but I didn’t turn to look at him. I focused on lining up the right-hand mirror with the minivan beside me.
“I’m so sorry,” he said quietly.
I turned the wheel—the correct direction this time—and pivoted the car to a perfect forty-five degrees from the curb.
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s been a tough time.”
I straightened the wheel, looked over my shoulder, and reversed into the parking spot. Just before the car touched the curb, I spun the wheel and eased it back, perfectly aligning with the van in front of it. I pulled the parking brake and waited.
The examiner took a small, almost imperceptible beat before scribbling something on his sheet.
“Am I good to go?” I asked.
“Yes, take us back to the registry please,” he said. All the gruffness had disappeared from his voice.
The car was silent on the ride back. Finally, he said, “When did your mother go into hospice care?”
“Last Friday,” I said.
“The day before your first test.”
“Yes.”
We returned to the registry. He gave me a carbon copy of my grading sheet, covered in check marks. A lady took my photo and asked me to record my signature on a tablet. Then she gave me a temporary licence to use until my new one came in the mail.
The examiner gave me a curt nod goodbye and wished me good luck with my English essay. I knew what he meant.
I drove straight from my test to the hospice. When I arrived, I caught Mom in a rare alert moment. Not only was she awake, but she seemed aware of where she was and who I was.
When I told her I passed my test, her smile filled up her whole face.
“I am so … proud of you,” she said. She spoke slowly and deliberately, pushing each word out with extraordinary effort. I could see her smile slip as the pain pushed through from underneath.
We hugged. I told her the story, but a lighthearted version. In my retelling, the examiner was comically grumpy rather than mean, and when I got to the bit when I told him to be nice to me, I exaggerated my little speech for dramatic effect. I didn’t mention the moment when I told him about the hospice.
She laughed. I laughed. We talked until she fell asleep.
I didn’t know it yet, but that was the last conversation I would ever have with my mom.
I drove home by myself. The hospice was in the country, and I had to take rural backroads, gravel grinding loudly under my tires.
I thought it would feel scarier, driving by myself. In each of the thousand times I had imagined it, I always thought I would feel jittery without someone in the passenger seat to offer directions or grab the wheel if I accidentally turned it the wrong way.
Instead, it felt the same as it always did. It was quieter, maybe, without a companion for conversation, but everything else—the gear shift and the turn signals and the mirrors and the lights—was identical. I was alone, but I still knew what to do.
It was past dusk, and the road was deserted, so I flicked on my high beams the way I had learned in driver’s ed. The two lights poured out from the front of the car, crossing together to form a single beam extending into the night. I found myself wondering where the beam stopped. The light was powerful, but it couldn’t go on forever. Somewhere out there in front of my car, whether it was a few metres or a few kilometres, the light ended, and the darkness began.
About three minutes into the journey, I felt a tightening in my chest. Something I had been holding in for days was pushing on my sternum and my throat, as if it was asking to be released.
I pulled over to the side of the road and immediately, big, wet tears emerged from the inner corners of my eyes. They ran down my face and neck in steady trails, pooling at the collar of my sweater. My breathing hitched and hiccupped, and I let it. I let the tears fall and my throat catch and my body shake, releasing myself to the violent, cathartic ugliness of it all.
Eventually, the stream slowed to a trickle, and then a drip. The shaking ended and I started to breathe normally again, chest rising at regular intervals instead of shuddering. I felt suddenly, eerily calm.
For one more moment, I sat in silence, meditating on the sensation of the last few tears drying on my cheeks. Then, I put the car back in gear, shoulder-checked, and pulled onto the road.
I gripped the wheel and leaned onto the gas pedal, gently accelerating into the path of my headlights. As the car sped faster, the road blurred, grey cement and yellow paint blending into one another as it disappeared under my tires.
I was driving.

Kelsey Gilchrist

is a Toronto-based writer and marketing strategist. Born and raised in southern Alberta, she writes about her relationship with her childhood and hometown. She is working on her first novel.

 personal apocalypse

Whitney French

it’s my father’s knife
the weight of it, do I
carry him on my hip?

I can’t pick out a bad
lover but I pick out
a bad drop when I see one

three drops of bleach
can go a long way when
working with muddy waters

my teacher told me only the men
can skin a lynx, the girls are better off
with rabbit hide, even fox, but my teacher
is long dead, this lynx freshly dead & I am
no longer a girl

camomile calendula rosemary witch hazel

bundled tight, tucked
under my shirt—I read somewhere
if you wrap a body, flu-ridden,
in milk-sopped sunflower leaves
by three days they are cured seeds
braided in my sister’s hair she is/was
the one who showed me how long to
soak before pushing in soil, soft words
& open palms to the sky
quick-time ceremony

a flint
a canteen
a companion
a compass
a conscience
a good pair of boots
a great sense of humour

moonseed looks a lot like grapes. if I was better
fed I’d ignore them, but I haven’t seen anything
resembling food in days—the stem tucked
at the base distinguishes what is juicy & what is
deadly—to be sure, plantain leaves
chewed up & spat out keep me
going, keep dotting the path, draws
the attention of ants

a two-way radio
a roll of gauze
an aversion to bullshit

never underestimate the versatility of a big-ass stick

a lot of safety pins
a resistance to the cold
a source of non-perishable protein
an ability to be vulnerable

his initials burnt into the handle
of the knife, they’re my initials too
softness of my thumb against razor
after all these years, still sharp

my brother is/was taller
than my father at twelve
but I was still stronger;
helping drag the lynx meat
to the shed to be cured—
the space smelling of flesh
& heat & boys shoo-ed me

out the door under wooden steps
grow reishi the size of my palm
a careful cut to keep it growing my mother
is/was a fan of wild harvest mushrooms,

“forage when you can,
that’s your version of hunting.”

a keen eye, a pack of matches
a firearm without a magazine
a spool of fishing wire
a knack for gender-bending many layers
double to keep me warm to keep me androgynous

butterflies often mean
flowers sometimes mean
fruit less likely mean food;
against odds, I follow
my winged friend, my back
against a swaying tulip tree
resting with perhaps my last
living relative

later:
wrapped in the silence of a summering eve
slicing stem to procure wild serviceberry
in a hemlock field, I am meeting a new part
of myself in the reflection of this blade
against moonlight.

Whitney French

(she/her) is a writer, multidisciplinary artist, and publisher. She is the editor of the award-winning anthology Black Writers Matter (University of Regina, 2019) and editor of Griot: Six Writers Sojourn into the Dark (Penguin Random House, 2022). Her writing has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, FIYAH Magazine, Geist, The Ex-Puritan, and others. Whitney French is a certified arts educator, a creative writing instructor at University of Toronto, and the co-founder of Hush Harbour, the only Black queer feminist press in Canada. Her novel-in-verse, Syncopation, is forthcoming with Wolsak & Wynn. Currently, she lives in Toronto.

 Peach & Slate

Annick MacAskill

Floating in the middle of the laptop screen, the cursor looked like a fly on the satin finish of the wedding gown. Jamie chewed her lip, cross-legged on the oak chair she’d inherited from her grandfather, both hands clutching a half-empty bottle of craft lager.
The cocktail-style dress was perfect. She didn’t know what to do about it because the whole thing had started as a joke just a couple hours before, when Lara mentioned proposing to Cait.
“It’s too soon,” Lara had whispered into her pint, sitting across from Jamie on the patio of the Lower Deck, her back to the ocean, its surface glinting in the light of the setting sun. Jamie had started to comfort her friend, the words rushing out of her.
“Not too soon,” she said. It was barely six months since Lara and Cait had started dating, but Jamie couldn’t stomach the thought of Lara feeling embarrassed. “You’ll need a dress, though.”
Lara’s laugh rung her surprise.
“Simple, sleek,” Jamie continued, the outfit quickly rising to the surface of her mind. “Calf-length. Strapless. Maybe a headband—no, nothing on your head. Maybe earrings, but no necklace. Satin, or satin-y. Creamy, not too too white.”
Jamie meant ivory, but couldn’t think of the word for the shade she saw in her imagination. It was a clear, sunny May day, still chilly enough by the water that the pair had their windbreakers zipped up to their chins. It felt at once lovely and absurd to talk of wedding dresses.
When Jamie finally stopped rambling, she noticed the smile spreading across Lara’s face. She felt a tightening under her breastbone, an emotion darker, deeper than her initial instinct to encourage her friend. Like a balloon blown up too far—a big, stupid, ivory balloon in her chest. Jamie put up a hand before her face, palm out to the ocean, pretending the tears were brought on by the glare off the water.

Why not be happy for Lara, why not bring the focus there? Jamie reasoned to herself later, walking home alone and half drunk from the bar. Cait was the butch lawyer she and Lara had daydreamed about together. Jamie even liked her. Cait was a bit uptight, but also sweet and funny. She had driven the three of them to a sugar bush outside the city one Saturday that winter, bought them all lunch at a diner on the way, asked Jamie thoughtful, interested questions. In the snowclad forest, bright pink circles appeared on the tops of Cait’s cheeks, her green eyes constantly darting back to Lara no matter what they were doing. The pair had matching tartan scarves around their necks, matching silky trails of breath rising from their mouths, that same stupid grin, even as kids shoved by them, even as the tour guide droned on for too long. Together Cait and Lara were too cute, too perfect.

Jamie had met Lara late the previous summer, in August, only a few months before Lara met Cait, when Jamie was preparing to move out of the apartment she’d hastily leased in the west end after an unexpected breakup with her girlfriend. The landlord of this new apartment was letting Jamie out of her lease early because she’d shown him the mould flourishing like graffiti over the basement walls. He’d denied there was any reason to be concerned until she pointed out the green fuzz spread over the silver gleam of her tools. It was disgusting, she told her friends later, but disgusting in an amazing way, not like centipedes crawling the bathroom floor or spoiled food in the refrigerator. Impressively disgusting.
Her friend Liz came over one muggy evening to help her pack. Jamie had met Liz at the bookstore when Liz was still at NSCAD. Jamie appreciated the way her co-worker quietly straightened Jamie’s haphazard book displays and showed her how to process refunds. After Liz graduated and left the bookstore for a job in a gallery by the waterfront, the two gradually became friends. Liz kept busy with work, bookbinding classes, and the journals she made with her own marbled paper, selling these at a couple of stores downtown, but she was always up for a pint, or more practical tasks like talking through breakups and organizing apartment renos and moves.
Liz showed up that day with her curly hair secured in a high bun. She brought a six-pack of cider and her friend Lara, a girl whose legs revealed a deep tan under the impeccable fringe of her cut-offs. Lara was quick to organize the three of them into an assembly line, neat stacks of cardboard boxes laid flat by their feet. As if it were Lara and not Jamie who was moving, she put herself at one end, taping the cardboard seams shut, instructing the other two women on how to best combine books, pots, and dishtowels so that the boxes were full but not heavy.
The next day Jamie got Lara’s number from Liz. That evening, after working her way through three beers on the front stoop, Jamie texted, asking if she could buy Lara a drink or lunch as a thank-you. Lara replied two hours later, when Jamie had already given up and gone to bed, suggesting they meet at the flowering agave in the Public Gardens. They got together on a weekday afternoon when they both had the day off, Lara’s legs now concealed by a tropical-print dress that came to her ankles.
From the gardens, Lara and Jamie weaved their way through downtown to the seaport market, where Jamie bought them a pork bun and a latte. They watched as disappointed-looking cruise ship passengers strolled by and as bleary-eyed straight couples led preschoolers to get ice cream at the chocolate shop. Lara tore the bun they shared into bite-sized pieces and told Jamie about her job teaching English and Portuguese at the language centre in town. She talked at length about the school’s clients, how the international students had charming and sometimes mordant things to say about Halifax, how the local Anglophones had trouble imitating the throatier sounds made in Portuguese.
The afternoon at the market became a weekly ritual. Sitting by the water, stretching their legs out in the sun, they talked about being single, about scrolling Tinder on lonely Friday nights, scanning for girls who were cute and looked like they liked camping, or at least were open to being taken camping. When fall came, they moved their meetings to cafés and bars, trading anecdotes about co-workers, past relationships, parents. They shared a fuzzy fantasy of meeting a high-powered butch lawyer, a woman who knew how to construct and install floating shelves, charm their mothers, and win over their fathers with a firm but casual knowledge of Scotch.

Jamie’s new apartment was just a few streets down from the mould-infested basement she’d left behind. The ground floor of a renovated semi with lots of natural light, it seemed too good to be true, especially at that price, especially in that neighbourhood.
The house’s wood-panelled exterior was a pale peach, the paint faded and chipped, but the door was a rich, muddy slate. Why not white, or just a darker shade of peach? Jamie wondered after moving in. She wasn’t the most aesthetically inclined person—she hadn’t, after all, stopped to consider the colour of the house when she checked out the apartment—but now it occurred to her what an odd combination the colours were. The first time Lara visited, Jamie found out why the door was grey. Lara knew the couple who had lived there before Jamie: a sous-chef Lara met in her undergrad and his girlfriend, a doula who decided she hated both the east coast and her boyfriend about a month after they moved into the apartment. Jamie was only a bit surprised that Lara knew the backstory. Halifax was small like that—everyone knew each other through former roommates or hookups or school or the music scene. Jamie was still getting used to it.
Lara, who wasn’t from Halifax either, but who had lived there a few years longer, explained that her friend Miles had painted the door slate as a surprise for his girlfriend, who loved the colour. The door was to be a present for their nine-month anniversary. After that, Miles planned on getting painters to come over and finish the rest of the house in a lighter grey, maybe a dove grey. He had already talked to the landlord and the upstairs neighbour, offering to cover the cost of painting the door, reasoning that the rest of the paint job would be a worthy investment in the house’s value. But when Miles showed his girlfriend the freshly painted door, she blew her perfect bangs off her face and told him she was moving out. Jamie got a good price on the apartment not because of a stranger’s generosity but because the previous tenants had bailed on the lease.
A week after Lara shared the story of Miles and his ex-girlfriend, Jamie came home from her shift at the bookstore to find palm-sized white birds stencilled in a loose pattern over the door. She moved the pads of her fingers over the shapes, wondering if they had been drawn on in chalk by some of the kids on her street, but the birds were too carefully executed, a small flock flying in all directions, and when she touched the shapes, the white stayed put. As she pulled her hands away, she felt her phone buzz in her pocket. She took it out and scanned the text. Lara had used a temporary paint that could be washed away with a sponge and some tap water. Welcome home, Lara wrote. Hope we last longer than that str8 couple.
Lara was what Jamie secretly called a lesbian lesbian. Lara had never dated a man and couldn’t imagine being with one. She had spent herchildhood dreaming of running away with She-Ra. As a teen, she fell for Jennifer Aniston and her early-nineties shag haircut while watching Friends reruns with her older brother. Like Jamie, she used the word queer because of the flexibility it suggested, but her desire seemed to flow cleanly in one direction, while Jamie was constantly running up against the reminder that she was attracted to men as well as women.
Jamie’s first crushes had been on both the male and female Planeteers from Captain Planet, a show her father recorded every week on VHS, which meant Jamie was able to watch and rewatch episodes as she pleased. In high school, she became infatuated with both Leonardo DiCaprio and the smell of her best friend’s lip gloss, a heady mix of artificial strawberry and beeswax.
Lara had come out to her parents when she was still in high school and claimed her sexuality had never been an issue for them. Jamie had come out to her mother halfway through her second year of university, when she was two months into dating a girl for the first time. Her mother had sat on the couch across from Jamie, listening to her daughter’s confession, then sighed and gone back to draping a popcorn chain over the Christmas tree.
Years later and Jamie had still not come out to her father. After Vanessa she dated Nick, then Taylor then John then Hilary. Girl, boy, girl, boy, girl. For a while it seemed like she had to come out again every time she started dating someone new. Her mother’s soft sounds of interest and understanding did little to detract from the dazed look she got when Jamie talked about her partners, as if her daughter were constantly transitioning from heterosexuality to homosexuality and back again, just to confuse everyone.
“I’m just queer, Mom,” Jamie had said once, unable to hide the frustration in her voice. What seemed so natural always became complicated when she tried to describe it. “Just, like, bisexual, I guess,” she added, though she hated the word.
“Well, I knew that,” her mother replied, turning to inspect the seam in the couch cushion. Jamie wondered if it would be easier if she could tell her parents that she was a lesbian. If she were simply gay, her father might still never be able to acknowledge her the way she wanted, but at least her mother wouldn’t be so confused. Whenever Jamie brought up the idea of telling her father about a girlfriend, her mother brushed it off, encouraging her to wait. Even when Jamie moved in with someone, her mother found a way to imply that it made more sense to let Jamie’s father keep thinking her girlfriend was just another roommate, just another friend.
“When’s the last time you went home?” Lara asked one afternoon late in September, the two of them watching the ocean.
“Home?” Jamie asked, sipping her bubble tea. She examined a wrinkle in her skirt, a sporty khaki piece with too many pockets that pinched her waist whenever she shifted on the bench.
“Like, do you go back to Ontario every summer?”
“What for?”
“To see your parents?”
They were sitting on the boardwalk along the harbour. Throngs of tourists dressed in denim and pastels snaked by, tugging on their collars. It was muggy, the kind of weather that lagged before a thunderstorm finally broke, and Lara and Jamie were still in short sleeves. The spectre of a cruise ship hovered over the market, clean and white like a giant bathtub toy.
“I don’t know.” Jamie frowned. “I go home for Christmas, if I’m single. But it’s expensive. Why? What about you?”
“Twice a year, usually. I’d go more often, but my parents are coming out here this fall. They’ll stay with me for a week or so.”
“Isn’t that awkward?”
Lara laughed, an easy, light sound. “I mean, sure. You’ve seen my place. It’s tiny.”
“No, but like—if you’re seeing someone.”
“They’re not like that.”
“Really?” Jamie wrinkled her nose, wishing Lara would change the subject.
“What are you getting at?”
“I guess—what if you were dating a girl? Like, seriously?”
The crease between Lara’s eyebrows returned. “It’s not the 1950s. Wait, is that what you’re worried about?”
Before Jamie could answer, a fuzzy pink-and-yellow ball bounced up to the bench, whacking Lara on the knee.
“Ow!”
Jamie lunged for the ball. She moved so quickly that later that day she’d find a small tear in the seam of her skirt, a puckered hole along her left hip, revealing a glimpse of her underwear, cotton that had once been white but had worn to the colour of dishwater.
“Watch it,” she snapped at the woman who chased after the ball.
“I’m so sorry.” The woman winced. “I told you to be careful when we walk by,” she said to the boy at her side. He ignored her, staring out at Georges Island, a clump of land that had been used by the British military in the eighteenth century as a deportation centre for the Acadians. Now it was inhabited by a colony of snakes, or so Lara had told Jamie.
“Maybe take the ball from him, then?” Jamie asked.
“It’s fine.” Lara tugged at the hem of Jamie’s shirt. She smiled up at the mother, who relaxed her face. Jamie almost startled, realizing the woman was probably no older than they were.
“It wasn’t that hard,” Lara continued, her voice smooth as she offered the woman a small smile. “I wasn’t hurt, just surprised,” she added, glancing at Jamie out the corner of her eye.

Jamie met Lara’s parents a month before Lara met Cait. They came to town to visit one week in November. The weather had already turned and they chose to spend their days huddled inside their daughter’s bachelor while Lara was off teaching at the language institute.
Lara texted Jamie intermittently to update her on her parents. Three days into their visit, she called during Jamie’s shift at the bookstore.
“You have to come to dinner with us,” Lara hissed into the phone.
“They’re driving me B-A-N-A-N-A-S.”
Jamie agreed to meet them that evening at a wine bar downtown. She donned her raincoat, a cheery sky blue and much too thin, and took the bus, timing her route so that she would arrive exactly five minutes late. When she entered the restaurant, Lara waved from a booth where she was sitting across from a silver-haired couple wearing cabled cardigans. They smiled at Jamie as she slid next to their daughter. The woman had Lara’s high cheekbones and heart-shaped face, the man her amber eyes.
They ordered a bottle of Okanagan pinot noir in honour of Lara and her parents’ home and enough tapas to overwhelm the table. A bowl of olives shiny as pearls perched high on a Lazy Susan in the centre of the spread. Jamie fixed her gaze on the olives so as not to stare at Lara’s parents. Every few minutes, she lifted a hand to check the side braid she’d pleated in her hair before rushing out the door.
Lara’s parents were both retired teachers. They started the conversation with an extended meditation on the size of their daughter’s apartment and her “curious” position at the language school downtown.
“No health insurance!” Lara’s father exclaimed. “She never knows when she’ll be teaching again!” her mother added, at which point Jamie realized they were waiting for her to acknowledge the absurdity of the situation. She avoided her friend’s gaze and forced a smile.
As the evening progressed, John and Esther found a way to casually tease information out of their daughter’s friend. Jamie answered their questions about her childhood in Ontario, sidestepping the subjects of her mother’s Mennonite roots and her father’s drinking problem. She glossed over the bout of depression she’d suffered after breaking up with Hilary, the first person she ever thought she would marry. She didn’t get into the weeks she’d spent unable to keep any food down before noon, or how she cried the first time she had sex with a man after that. He was a professor in the English department where she’d started and abandoned a master’s, convinced that he’d told everyone about the affair. She alluded to this incomplete degree, but vaguely, she hoped.
At one point, when they had eaten half the tapas and moved on to a third bottle of wine, Lara steered the conversation to the bookstore. Jamie’s cheeks grew hot, and she stared into her drink, raising a hand to tug on her braid, unsure as to whether she was on her third or fourth glass, how long she’d been talking, or what it meant that Lara wanted to change the subject. She worried that if she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror she’d find her teeth stained purple. Lara’s father was holding his wife’s hand, looking right at her. She couldn’t read the expression on his face.
When Lara started talking about Jamie’s co-workers, Jamie’s mind flew to the long, drawn-out fuck-buddy relationship she’d had with a co-worker named Kevin her first winter at the store. Jamie knew Lara hadn’t intended to make her think of him, or to embarrass her, because she hadn’t told Lara about Kevin, a fellow English grad who never went to the gym yet somehow maintained firm arms that Jamie loved to run her palms over. The sex had been so good that Jamie still felt an itch up the back of her neck whenever she thought of him. Whatever ease they enjoyed in bed would dissipate as soon as Jamie’s wool-socked feet hit his hardwood floor. Kevin abruptly decided to move to Calgary in March, a few months into their relationship—or affair, or whatever it was—and would never write to her, and Jamie wouldn’t miss him.

After dinner, Lara walked Jamie home, trailing a half step behind her. Jamie’s tongue felt thick and dry in her mouth, her feet heavy. It was a long walk, most of it uphill, but the rain had stopped and she didn’t want to pay for a cab. She walked with her raincoat bunched in her arms, waiting for Lara to say something.
“It’s just—” Jamie started when they got to her house. Jamie would have left the white birds on the door forever, but the rain had washed them away months ago.
Lara took Jamie’s hands in hers, then pressed against her—first her chest, then her torso, then her lips. For a long moment, the two women kissed. There was something straightforward about the embrace, but when she pulled away Jamie saw that her friend had closed her eyes.
“My parents loved you,” Lara said. She paused before adding, “They love all my friends.” In the dark, her irises were large and inky.
Lara texted her first thing the next morning, repeating the simple conclusion of the night before—My parents loved meeting you. Jamie took her time examining the verb, but waited until the late afternoon to answer. Me too! :)
Days went by and Jamie didn’t hear anything more from Lara. Jamie didn’t write, either. After a week they exchanged a few simple messages about how busy they were, promising to get together soon.
Almost a month later they were in a bar again, a different, less expensive one, drinking stout this time, waiting for Liz. The three of them hadn’t hung out together since that first day in August, the intimacy between Jamie and Lara growing so quickly. The overexcited beginning to a friendship that meant it was sure to fizzle out, Jamie would think years later, reflecting on how she’d eventually lost touch with Lara. Already that December there was something new between them. Jamie wasn’t sure what it was, but she knew she felt exposed.
Lara had texted that they should meet with Liz for a drink before the holidays. Jamie accepted, hoping they might start planning the queer Christmas they’d talked about for months. In the back of her mind, Jamie imagined kissing Lara on New Year’s, asking her out. Maybe it would work. Maybe Lara would be delighted, would realize they made sense. Maybe Jamie was as gay as Lara was, one of those lesbians who just slept with men occasionally for fun, but wasn’t actually bisexual.

Jamie and Lara had a few minutes to themselves because Liz was running late. So late in fact that by the time she showed up, handsome Cait had already crossed the bar, pint in hand, primed to charm Lara and Jamie both, her smile broadening the chasm that had come between them.

Months later, barely a week after Lara confessed on the patio that she wanted to marry Cait, Jamie was working in the bookstore on a Thursday evening. It was raining and the store was quiet, just a couple regulars browsing the stacks. Lara kept texting, but Jamie ignored the messages, not even opening them to see what they said. Their friendship had almost gone back to normal after Lara met Cait, and now it felt impossible to talk without saying what she really meant. Jamie tried to distract herself, picking up extra shifts and even vaguely agreeing to spend a couple weeks back in Ontario that summer. Her mom had started emailing links to postgrad programs at the community college in Jamie’s hometown.
She kept her phone in her left hand, glancing at it under the counter when she was sure the customers weren’t looking, feeling it tremble every time Lara sent a text. Whenever she had a moment to herself, she scrolled through images of ivory gowns, sucking her bottom lip. When she realized that the phone had stopped vibrating, Jamie looked up and stared out the window at the rain, steady and loud like static on an old television, wondering who the hell she was going to talk to about this.

annick macaskill’s

fiction has previously appeared in journals such as Canthius, Plenitude Magazine, and The Temz Review. She is the author of three previously published poetry collections, including Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), winner of the Governor General’s Award. Her fourth book of poetry, Votive, will be published by Gaspereau in 2024. MacAskill lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia), on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq.

Moving Furniture

Michelle Berry

Harper is moving the furniture around. She’s moving the living room into the dining room and the dining room into the room off the kitchen. She’s putting towels and bathmats under the furniture and pushing it across the floors. Over bumps, around heating vents, past the dog toys. She’s building up sweat and has Spotify on a podcast. It’s like a puzzle, placing things in the areas that balance, that aren’t in front of windows, that give the best views of the room when you sit in them. Places that fit, that feel good. The couch needs to be blocking the front door but not get in the way of people coming in. Although for two years no one has come in. The side tables have to be reachable when coffee is poured in case she can eventually go back to pouring coffee for guests. In case she ever wants to have guests in. There aren’t many people she trusts anymore. The dining room table has to balance the sideboard. Everything has to fit and feel right. That’s the goal.
When Damian lived here, he would roll his eyes, groan, whine if she started to move furniture. He would sometimes even throw his arms in the air and then disappear upstairs to his office to put his headphones on and dive back into his work. Harper was never sure, really, what his work was. He told her many times, but she just didn’t get it. It was easy to ignore what he did when he worked out of the house, but during the last two years when he stayed upstairs in his office, it just sounded like arguments. Zoom arguments. It sounded to her like he never really got anything done, or accomplished, but money came in so he must have been doing something. When they agreed to live together, after she asked him for his sperm, they didn’t think they would be together this long. And together through all of this. They both thought one of them would get his/her act together after a couple of years and move out. But now it has become eight years of living together. Two years at the end with the Virus. Now he’s gone, though, and Harper can move the furniture in peace.
Harper could have left everything the same, like it was yesterday, but moving the furniture gives her immense satisfaction. It’s palpable. As she creates new rooms, her anger and frustration disappear. For a moment, for the day after or the week after the new creation, she feels whole again. While she’s moving the furniture, she feels exercised and powerful. She’s creating a new world around herself—sure, the new world has the same crappy garage-sale stuff in it, but it’s markedly different. For example, this couch—right here by the door, now blocking the entrance from the door to the living room—this couch creates a wall. She stands back and admires it. It takes a moment to be sure. Sometimes she has to move everything before she can tell if it works.

Camille comes into the room. Damian’s spawn, Harper likes to think of her. A funny girl. A sweetheart. Perfectly easy to live all locked up with. Camille skirts past the dust bunnies and notices the cat sitting, wrapped up in his tail, on the newly placed couch. The dog is nowhere to be seen; Harper figures she scared her away with the vacuum cleaner. Camille jumps on the couch and snuggles the cat. The cat mews. He sat there quietly, stayed solidly on the couch as Harper pulled it around on the bath mat. He took the bumps with aplomb, letting out the occasional mew. Camille is eight and the cat is eight. The cat came with Damian. So did Camille, if you think about it. The cat and the girl stare at each other. Camille kisses the cat on the nose. She loves the cat. Harper is sure Camille never loved Damian. She hasn’t even mentioned that he’s gone. Harper let him stay in her house because it was big, there are many rooms, and she was a new mom and scared, so what was she to do? Besides, he split the cost of the furniture.
“Why?” Camille asks.
“Why what?” Harper says.
“Why are you moving the furniture again? Didn’t you do this last month?”
“And the month before,” Harper sighs, “And the month before that …”
Camille shrugs. “You’re right. It’s your thing.”
Harper shrugs back.
Every single time Camille asks her why. Harper feels she should know by now.

It’s raining outside, a deep, heavy rain, and the day is cold and dark. For July, this seems odd. Odd even to Harper, who is thirty-two and has seen days like this, and knows people pretend there is climate change. She does realize that June’s heavy heat and drought wasn’t normal, but climate change? Who cares if July is cold now, she thinks. That’s just the way it is. It’s not as if she ever goes outside. At least no farther than the back porch. Camille, on the other hand, is only eight years old and tells Harper it’s a crappy July day and asks how many more days will be like this.
“This isn’t normal,” she says. “Is it?”
Camille watches her mother work, Harper can feel her daughter obviously thinking as Harper holds her hands out in front of her, measuring spaces for tables and chairs, her feet counting out the length of a rug.
“When will it stop raining?” Camille says into the cat’s fur. The cat mews. His name is Augustine and he’s black with white markings on the tip of his forehead, on his ears, on the end of his tail. He’s thick and bony at the same time. Camille is constantly telling Harper that Augustine is wonderful. “He’s a doll,” Camille says. “Such a doll.”
And then: “I want to swing.” Harper stops and looks out the window. She pulls back the curtain to look out. The street is deserted, the rain pouring down. The backyard swing is used on special days. The weather has to be just right, and they have to be able to get inside quickly if they see anyone on the street. There can’t be any mud to slip in, that’s for sure.
“Too wet,” Harper says.
The huge arching light goes over here. That way Harper can sit and read under it. And put her coffee on the table beside her. She breathes deeply. Camille watches closely. The rain continues. Augustine sleeps.

Almost twenty-four months they’ve been stuck inside the house. Even if it weren’t raining, Harper thinks, Camille wouldn’t be with her friends. She asked her daughter the other day about them, friends, and Camille said she can’t even remember them. Even if it weren’t raining, Harper would be moving furniture. For almost twenty-four months the house has been very different every four weeks. Sometimes twice in a month. Harper has always liked to move furniture. But before the virus when she would move things Damian and Camille were gone most of the day. Damian worked out of the house and would come home and discover the change. And Camille would come back from school and notice it. And both of them enjoyed it then. But now…
Once, last December, Harper moved the master bedroom into the living room downstairs. This was a heroic move and took a week, so Harper didn’t touch the set-up for a while. She had to take apart the bed and the couch and put them back together, she had to use her handcart and thump up and down the stairs one step at a time. And then she realized that sleeping in the living room wasn’t a great idea—there were no blackout curtains there, for one, and Camille came in most mornings with her cereal in a bowl and slurped it up while sitting on Harper’s toes on her bed. So a little later it all went upstairs again, and the couch came back downstairs, and now Harper is putting the couch into the dining room and the dining room into the back room and the back room into the living room. It’s a good thing that she has such light furniture. A goal all her life: to populate her house with very, very light furniture.
Harper looks at her emerging creation and realizes that this configuration doesn’t make sense. The kitchen table from the back room is now in her living room. Now she’ll have to walk through doors and hallways to eat her cereal in the morning.
Harper shakes her head. Camille watches her. Harper feels the eyes, all the time, on her. Camille has brown eyes and they fix on a body like a gun scope. If Camille were a little older, say thirteen, Harper thinks she would say something sarcastic like, “On the rag?”
So Harper says it instead: “It must be my period. Every time I move furniture it’s right before or during my period. You’re lucky, Cam, you won’t have this issue for years.”
“That’s good,” Camille says, “because we only have so many options with the furniture.”
Harper laughs.
Harper doesn’t move the plant when she moves the rug and Camille jumps up from the cat to catch it before it falls. And that’s when the doorbell rings.
Years ago, Camille was in the real world. She remembers it briefly. Walking with her mom to school, having to get up on time, having to carry her lunch box and listen to her teachers read her books even though she already knew how to read. And now she is safe, or she was safe, before the doorbell rang.
No one has rung the doorbell for about six months when the guy who delivered Harper’s thyroid pills from the pharmacy rang it and then waved at them through the glass. Harper explained that he has to ring the doorbell and wait to see if you’ll get your medicine because what if they were leaving Oxy at the door and someone else stole it from the front porch. At least that’s what Harper explained when Camille leapt out of the chair at the kitchen table (which was then in the living room)from the unexpected sound. The cat leapt, too. Harper hadn’t needed her thyroid medication for about a year, so they had all forgotten about the pharmacy guy ringing the doorbell. Everyone was startled. Even the guy at the front door was startled when Camille’s freaked-out face popped up. Usually all their packages are left on the front porch in the bin they have there for that purpose. The bin that says, in large letters on top: All Deliveries in Here. But even though it says this, still some of the deliveries end up on the porch, not in the bin. In fact, a lot of them end up propped against the front door, which is horrible, because in order to get outside to get her package, Harper has to push through the package itself. When Harper ordered the arching light, which has a marble base, she had to mask up and go out the back door and come around the front in order to move it so she could open the door. And then the long process of sterilization. It was a hassle.
The doorbell rings again. Harper and Camille are looking at each other. They didn’t order any medication, did they? Harper has to climb over some unplaced furniture to see around the hallway to who is at the door. No one she recognizes. Someone in a mask and a hat, a fedora she thinks, she isn’t sure what a fedora is, but this might be it. A man. Camille looks around the corner behind Harper. She squints and Harper thinks Camille might need glasses. And then she squeals. The sharp sound makes Augustine jump off the couch. It shocks Harper.
“It’s Mr. Whaley,” Camille says.
“Who?”
“Mr. Whaley! My teacher two years ago! In grade one.”
Harper raises her eyebrows. “What do you think he wants?”
“I don’t know,” Camille almost shouts as she leaps over the couch and runs to the front door.
“Don’t open it,” Harper says. “Put your mask on!”
Camille buries her hands into her jean pockets. “He’s getting wet,” she shouts. “We need to open the door.”
“Mask! Do not open the door!”
Harper has her mask on already and heads past Camille, who is still digging for her mask. She waits until Camille has her mask on and then pulls open the door. Just slightly. Their first visitor in over a year. It’s an instinct to open the door even though she realizes in a second that she shouldn’t do it.
“Hi, Mr. Whaley,” Camille says, too loudly, through her mask.
“Hello, Camille. You must be the mom? Harper, is it?” Mr. Whaley extends his hand toward Harper and then sees the horrified expression on Harper’s face and puts his hand back down at his side. “Sorry about that,” he says.
Harper nods and backs away slightly. The door is open only a gap, just enough to hear Mr. Whaley. “What can we do for you, Mr. Whaley?”
Harper stands there, her arms crossed in front of her, not letting Mr. Whaley into the house. Her foot is on the bottom of the door, ready to push it closed in an instant. And then Mr. Whaley does the unspeakable, he does something odd. It shocks both Harper and Camille. He takes off his mask. And he begins to speak.
Harper ducks her head, and rushes back a bit into the house. Camille does too. It’s been so long since she’s seen the bottom of someone’s face. Why would he do that? Take his mask off. Augustine tries to escape through the front door, but Harper moves quickly forward and shuts it on Mr. Whaley and almost on Augustine’s face and they all look at each other through the glass. Mr. Whaley has backed up considerably in the panic.
Nothing is said for what seems like hours. They all three just stare at each other. Mr. Whaley’s nose flares, he grits his teeth. He is fairly young, even with his fedora on. He is around Harper’s age, and he is making her very nervous. Maybe he’s a child molester? Maybe he’s here to get Camille? Harper shivers. If she trusted the police, she would call them right now.
“Why would you take off your mask?” Harper says at the window, and then regrets it immediately when she realizes he will now say something back and spit and fluid may come from his nose, his mouth, when he speaks. It might splatter on the window. She might have to clean it up later. She stands back even farther from the closed door and holds Camille behind her.
“For two years,” Harper says, mostly to Camille as Mr. Whaley obviously can’t hear her, “for two years we’ve worn masks and been very careful. What are you doing?” All she wants to do is go back to moving furniture. Maybe, she thinks, the bedroom, her bedroom, on the second floor, would fit in the guest room at the back of the house? She could sleep there and then move Camille’s room into the master room. That way Camille would get her own washroom. Ever since Damian has been gone there are so many more options in the house. Harper’s mind is befuddled right now, she’s confused, she can’t stop thinking, little explosions of thought—moving furniture, Damian, the man with no mask, the cat. And where is the dog?
When Damian lived here, he wanted everything the same. And he had no right. Although he did own half the furniture. That was part of their agreement when he moved in: he had to help buy lighter furniture. But he rolled his eyes if Harper decided to shuffle the furniture. It was always too much trouble for him, a waste of energy. He didn’t realize that it was Harper’s exercise, it was her brain working out and her body working out. Killing two birds, etc. But Damian spent eight years with it, two years during which Harper moved things more often, and then he left. Complained about a lot of things—her stacks of food, her incessant researching, her negative views on everything—but moving furniture was the number-one problem. One day he just threw his mask off and walked out the front door. She’s still shocked by this. She thinks of it as his suicide. He chose to leave his daughter and Harper and walk out into such uncertainty. What happened to him? And all because she liked to move furniture? They haven’t seen him since, Harper is certain he caught the Virus and died. What other reason would there be? But when she thinks about it a lot, he didn’t want Camille, anyway. He didn’t even name her, Harper did. And he seemed never to like Harper very much. He said he didn’t agree with her choices. And she just asked him for his fluids—he wasn’t really her friend or a lover or anything. Harper and Camille ended up both being messy and talkative and Harper moved everything around and Damian wanted silence to deal with his online work and he only came down from his office (which is now the second-floor craft room) for lunch or dinner and to scowl at the two females.
Phew. That was a long thought, she thinks. She is full of them. Mr. Whaley is at the front door looking in, gritting his teeth, his nose dripping rain, and Camille is behind her mother staring at him.
And then something else unexpected happens. The Amazon delivery guy comes up the stairs with what Harper and Camille think are the new cans of beans and maybe the lentils, coconut milk and lima beans. All the long-term food. Powdered orange drink and Habitant pea soup and canned spinach. The unexpected thing is that he walks right up to Mr. Whaley and they say hello—only STEPS AWAY FROM EACH OTHER—they are so close that Harper (and Camille, and maybe the cat) gasp. And they both aren’t wearing masks! And Mr. Whaley helps the delivery man with his heavy boxes. Their heads almost touch as they both bend to put the boxes in the bin.
After the men put the box of beans and the other boxes in the delivery box the Amazon delivery man leaves. He and Mr. Whaley say something funny to each other, they both laugh, they both point at the Amazon boxes, and then he climbs into his truck as if nothing has happened.
“Shit,” says Harper.
“That’s putting it mildly,” Camille says. “What is going on?”
Neither Camille nor Harper has seen anyone standing close to another person in two years. Sure, they are usually hanging out at the back of the house and don’t really see what happens when the deliveries come. And they don’t live in a busy neighbourhood. But still. It’s dangerous. Most of the time the curtains are closed, too, because the dog barks
“Where’s Bruiser?” Harper suddenly asks. “Where’s the dog?”
“In her cage,” says Camille. “You put her there when you were moving the couch.”
Harper nods. She forgot. That’s why there is no one barking at the front door right now. She must remember to take Bruiser down to the basement for her daily exercise after lunch. The dog is getting antsy without her walks. Two years with no walks.
“How are we going to eat lunch now,” Camille asks. “How will we get our beans? My powdered orange drink?” Harper knows Camille is thinking about the hours of sterilization that will have to happen before they can get their stuff from the porch. Especially with no masks on the men.
Mr. Whaley has turned again to the two females staring at him. He bangs on the door slightly with his knuckles. He says something but they can’t make it out behind the glass. “Open up,” Harper thinks he says. “I need to talk to you.” That’s what she thinks he’s saying but it just as well could be, “Open up, I’m going to infect you.” She watches his mouth move around. It’s odd to see a mouth now. His teeth are crooked and he obviously cut himself shaving.
Two years, twenty-four months, a lost sperm donor, everyone dying, long-term food deliveries in their bin, and at least twenty-four moves of furniture, maybe more, and this man expects them to open the door and end it all. What a moron.
“Never,” Harper shouts.
“Mom,” Camille whispers. “Oh my god, not so loud.”
“It’s been over for a long time,” Mr. Whaley shouts at the door.
“Camille has to come back to school. We are all safe now.”

Harper knows what’s going on. Suddenly she realizes that the news is right, there are people infected with the new vaccine and they are going crazy. This explains Mr. Whaley and the Amazon delivery guy.
“Have you been vaccinated?” Harper shouts at the door.
Mr. Whaley puts his hand up to his ear. “What?”
“Vaccinated,” Harper screams.
“Yes, of course, “ Mr. Whaley shouts back. “Everyone has. Haven’t you?”
Everyone? Oh God, Harper thinks. It’s worse than she imagines.
Just the other day Harper read a news story about how the vaccinations were changing people. How it attacks the brain and makes people do whatever the government asks them to do. Maybe this is a new ploy, knocking on the doors of those who haven’t been vaccinated. Harper doesn’t know what to do.
After the virus came, Harper found her own news—how to prepare for the end of the world, how it was all the government’s fault, how the vaccines were poison, with long term effects, or embedded with microchips. Harper believed most of it. It made sense to her. And then she got her own ideas about how to survive. She found Prepping websites and began to load up on the right food, the food that will last them months, and she covered the windows and made sure she had rubbermaid containers labelled and ready—full of things like peanut butter, pinto beans, Soup Girl dried soups, maple syrup, whole peas, pumpkin, tuna fish. Better safe than sorry, Harper thought. Camille liked to look through the bins, she liked to make lists of what they had and what they had used. She liked the sense of adventure, as if they were camping. As if they owned a grocery store. But Camille was also very scared, her mother’s preparation scared her. Was this the end of the world? Harper knew Camille was scared but didn’t know what to do about it. In a world like this, Harper reasoned, you had to be ready for everything.
Harper even bought a gun. She put it up high in the kitchen, behind the cookbooks they never used. Camille knew it was there but took an oath that she’d never get the ladder and climb up to see it.
And here they are talking to Mr. Whaley at the door. He’s saying the virus is gone, the pandemic is over. The furniture half moved and Augustine suddenly behind them. He stands staring at the door. He arches his back and meows. Time for lunch, is what he is saying. He says this about 10 times a day. Harper has taken to opening the tuna for him because he makes his way through all the cans of cat food too quickly. He’s not ready for the end of the world, that’s for sure. Plus Harper thinks he might have kidney issues or a urinary tract infection or diabetes—but she can’t take him to the vet so he’s going to have to live with it.
Outside Mr. Whaley is digging around in his briefcase—they didn’t know he had a briefcase, they couldn’t see it before and now Harper looks and sees his car too, the Amazon van backing down the driveway and off down the street—but he’s digging in his briefcase and pulls out a pen and some paper. He writes something on the paper—putting the briefcase to rest on the delivery box—and holds the paper up to the window. Camille and Harper can barely make out his handwriting. They squint.
The note says:

Don’t you know the virus is gone? For six months now.
Why are you still inside?

Harper blinks rapidly. Camille looks at her mom. Harper isn’t sure Camille can see the note with her eye problems. It’s small writing and hard to read. She would prefer that Camille can’t see it.
“What do we do now?” Camille asks. Harper figures she did read the note. Maybe her eyes aren’t so bad. Hmmmm, she thinks.
“Nothing,” says Harper. “Move furniture.”
“But….”
“But what? This is a lie. This is a conspiracy. This is how they get you. You remember what I told you about the vaccination. You remember what we read online? This is probably the effects of it. Mr. Whaley is infected with the vaccination. There’s no other alternative.”
“How…? What?” Camille’s eyes water slightly. The idea of going outside, seeing her friends, going to school again, being a real kid, is obviously making her slightly wild. She’s shaking a bit, Harper realizes.
“We’ll go outside, see the world and then what? Catch the virus and end up dead? Or have to get vaccinated, which is way worse. Just so you can see your friends?” Harper never means to scare her daughter, but she’s scared and it’s better to have company. “No way. There’s only one person I trust and that’s not Mr. Whaley, it’s me. I trust my research. You need to trust me too.”
“We’ll live,” whispers Camille. “You said the Virus was a conspiracy two years ago, too. That it wasn’t real. But then it was real and then we saved ourselves, but now we should go out.”
“I learned,” Harper says. “It was a conspiracy then, but once it was out in the world it became real. I’m smart, Camille. You know that. I tell you all the time. Trust me. Besides, the vaccine is bad for you. It kills you. This is all a ploy.”
“What does that mean? What do you mean?” Camille is becoming hysterical. Her hands are shaking, her eyes are wide. “Mom?” She points to Mr. Whaley at the door. “Mom?”
“I mean what I say,” Harper says. She turns away from Camille. She looks at Mr. Whaley’s eyes. She looks into them. She swears she can see the evil theorist, the fake news, she can see the vaccination bubbling up behind his pupils. She sees that he wants to dupe them and she, personally, isn’t so stupid. In fact, with all the research she’s done in the last two years, she is probably much smarter than almost anyone. She just wishes she was this smart when Camille was born—she wouldn’t have let the doctor give Camille those vaccinations for other things, for one. Harper hopes their older neighbours haven’t fallen for this. Is Mr. Whaley some door-to-door vaccine or virus salesman? Why would Damian never come back if he hadn’t caught the Virus and died? Maybe he got the vaccine and went crazy? Why would she have spent two years moving furniture to make their life more interesting? And all the online orders. How many online orders have they made and no one anywhere has said, “It’s all over”—mind you, Harper thinks, she did stop checking out the mainstream, Sheeple news, and, well that’s fake news, anyway. But no one on Reddit, none of the research she’s been doing, nothing she pays attention to says that the pandemic is over. And everything she reads talks about the vaccine side effects.
Harper’s head is aching.
Then it occurs to her that this is her nightmare. The one she had when Damian left. She kept dreaming that one day the pandemic would all be over and she wouldn’t know. Has this happened? How has this happened? Did she just stop paying attention—she had been watching every new outbreak, every new death, the refrigerated containers outside hospitals, the vaccination scam, how it wasn’t really working, she researched everything. When she wasn’t moving furniture, or thinking about moving furniture, she researched. Could the end have happened without her noticing? Is that possible?
Harper walks toward the glass in the door. She looks at Mr. Whaley out there, his note still held to the glass. She looks at Camille. Augustine is licking his butt on the floor. The dog is starting to stir in the back of the house. She can hear her whimpers and a whiny yawn.
Mr. Whaley holds up another note.
The note says:

Camille needs to come back to school. She’s been gone for 6
months. Everyone has been wondering what is going on.
You need to come outside and see that everything is over.
You both need to get vaccinated.

Harper thinks that, for a teacher, his handwriting is atrocious.
Harper looks back at Camille, behind her, half in the “living room” behind the couch. Half near the kitchen table. She looks at Augustine, still busy with his ablutions. Mr. Whaley is obviously wrong. Why doesn’t Damian come back if everything is over? Shouldn’t he come back? He just left her and walked away into a healthy life? That can’t be true. And, most of all, what will she do with all the Rubbermaid containers full of canned and dried food? What about the dried butter?
“What’s the note say, Mom?” Camille asks. This time she can’t see it.
Harper looks at Mr. Whaley’s pleading face. His maskless face. And she reaches up—he smiles, thinking she’ll open the lock—and she closes the curtains over him. He begins pounding on the door.
“Nothing,” she says over the noise. “He must have the Virus. Or the vaccine made him insane. He’s crazy not to wear his mask.”
Camille stares at the curtain for a minute. And then she says, “How are we going to get our beans? Our powdered orange drink? The Amazon guy left our beans out there. How are we going to have lunch?”
Harper thinks, we have thirty thousand dollars’ worth of food in this house, sure it’s dried or canned, but they don’t even need those beans. If Mr. Whaley stayed forever and died on the porch, they wouldn’t need those beans or that orange drink. Harper’s entire bank account, the family trust her dad and mom left her, went into buying this food. They are safe and fine and will be full every day. No problem. Her Prepper research was impeccable. They could live five years on what they have in the house. They have food and they have a place to live, and they have protection. Behind the cookbooks.
“We’ll just wait,” Harper says. “We’ll just go in the back, let Bruiser out of her cage, and wait. We can have rice cakes and peanut butter for lunch. Maybe we can move the kitchen around. Maybe we can organize the shelves again. We need to exercise Bruiser in the basement. The rain will stop soon and maybe you can go outside to swing later tonight. Or at least tomorrow.” Harper thinks that might be a bit of a lie because if everyone is vaccinated and going crazy, they might not be able to ever go out again. She’ll have to turn on her computer and try to figure that out.
Harper knows there’ll be a lot of waiting now. Although for two years there has been a lot of waiting. Harper is used to waiting. She can always move furniture. She’s glad Damian never came back, although she wouldn’t wish harm on anyone. They weren’t a couple, anyway; he just donated his fluid. Who cares if they lived in the same house for eight years? Although she does miss that he used to do some chores.
Camille sighs. But Harper sees her putting on her regular face—the face that says she’ll help. Camille has spent two years doing anything her mother asked, just to make her happy, and to make them both safe—and Augustine and Bruiser safe, too. Camille’s sadness makes Harper sad.
“Everyone needs to remain safe,” Camille says, “This Virus will kill you. The vaccines are bad. Poor Mr. Whaley. Poor Dad. Poor Amazon guy. Going home to his wife and kid, probably, and infecting them. If they are not already infected. I bet everyone out there is infected, don’t you, Mom?”
“The front-line workers,” Harper says. “They are falling like flies. When Mr. Whaley finally leaves, when he stops ringing the doorbell and making Bruiser bark, we will get our beans from the front porch and sterilize everything and then we will sit in the kitchen—no, wait—we will sit wherever the kitchen table is next, and we will eat our beans for dinner.”
There’s no way this can be over, Harper thinks. There is too much furniture to move.
The sudden sound of a siren permeates the air. Coming down the street. Bruiser stops barking. Camille looks at Harper. Harper looks at Camille. Camille sniffs. The pounding on the door starts again, this time louder. Harper sighs. Camille lets out a little cry. She snorts in her fear.
“I guess,” Harper says, finally taking off her mask, “I guess it’s time to get the gun.”

Michelle Berry

has published twelve books—novels, short-story collections, and anthologies—and multiple short stories in literary magazines. She teaches at the University of Toronto in continuing education, and owned and operated Hunter Street Books in Peterborough, Ontario, until the start of the pandemic. Her new novel, Satellite Image, is coming out with Buckrider Books in Fall 2024.

 To:

Matthew Gwathmey

the still dormant volcanoes of Japan X National Pi Day X
have X hold X breathing and swallowing in unison X
your health X peanut butter converted to diamonds X infinity X
the abundance of shades of red X the have-beens X atoms X
frozen air bubbles X gravity X duct tape wedding gowns X
the fear of creepy dolls X fish that walk on soil X Adams X
decomposing hot dogs X webworms on fungus-cocooned trees X
the world’s largest perennial flower X you X me X us X
solar neutrinos X that waterfall in Hawaii that flows backwards X
the fingerprints of koalas X ardour X potato batteries X
the Colossus X eyes that dart eighty times a second X being well X
Spoonerism Day X real flamingoes X a good stint X
glittering shores X volcanic lightning X the are-nows X
snails that sleep for decades X femurs X bliss X pink lakes X
the Big Bang X crickets detecting music through their knees X
crystal caves X the two-thousand-pound heart of a blue whale X
beefalo X reusable water bottles X icebergs staying icebergs X
the unknown colour of dinosaurs X barking sand dunes X
cell service on Mount Everest X the maybes X well-being X
cockroaches living underwater X reflective salt flats X
garlic mustard seeds X Mother Goose Day X ligers X
fringe-shaped coral reefs X magnetism X friendship (or not) X
artificial intelligence X hanging gardens X Byzantium X Rodin X
every day lasting a second longer than the day before X

Matthew Gwathmey

lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, on Wolastoqey Territory. His third poetry collection, Family Band, is forthcoming this fall with Gordon Hill Press.

Lions Gate Hospital is across the street, Jan. 2022

Meghan Kemp-Gee

Six months after the heat wave there are three
unprecedented winter storms. After
the strangeness, the snaps, the deepest snowfall,

the morning traffic’s body prone, pinned down
struggling to breathe, two cats watch salted

sidestreets from the eighth floor. The stuffed sky stills
and stuns us like so much heat. Their eyes grow
wide. Their four hunched shoulders heave, twitch-lipped teeth

chirping at something real or not. Like they
see some feathered not-nothing we can’t see.

What do you know that I don’t? Like there were
birds out there, small bodies like birds just out
of sight, like there were ghosts out in the snow.

Meghan Kemp-Gee

is the author of The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books, 2023), as well as three poetry chapbooks, What I Meant to Ask, Things to Buy in New Brunswick, and More. She also co-created the webcomic Contested Strip, recently adapted into a graphic novel, One More Year. She is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and currently resides in North Vancouver, British Columbia.