It was 20 May 2024, and a third dead child was discovered. Another girl. This time, down at the River Kelvin, near the art galleries. Like the two before, the body had been found at the verges. DC Helena Hamilton had no doubt that this poor wee soul’s demise would mirror the two innocents before:…

“‘I do not make rain. What I do is attract clouds.’ That’s what he said.” 1914, thought Agnes, had been a very bad year—but 1915 was already shaping up to be worse. San Diego was parched, a desiccated patch of desert on the California coast. Too long the city had thirsted for rain that never…

An ex-boyfriend writes me a PM on Facebook. He says I seem to have changed. Can we maybe talk? Can we maybe try to revive a sort of friendship? Of course I’ve changed. It’s been twenty years since I became the dumpsite of his emotions, since I was the one to give him a drumroll,…

I was idling at a red light at Mission and Western, a juncture where you could slip away from your life entirely and drive up the wild coast into the potential of ultimate freedom or make a left and then a right and end up at the gym. Each day since the inception of motherhood…

In the morning, she wakes up, gets out of bed, washes her hair, brushes her teeth. She fixes bran flakes with almond milk, leaves some biscuits out for the neighbour’s cat, puts on her skin and leaves for work. On her way out of the front door, she closes it then checks the handle three…

We are barrelling down American Avenue when the shuttle swerves again, throwing Missy up against the side of the van. She looks like she’s about to vomit, holding her purse in toward her stomach, and I can’t help but feel something. Missy is who she is and I am who I am, as the van…

It ends like it begins: with the tide. There is always the ocean, always the waves clawing hungrily at the shore. That’s the problem with these gaps, these spaces, these pieces of emptiness on the edge of things. They want. Our father left her sealskin under a floorboard in the attic. It wasn’t a mistake;…

A man stares at the tree, bark folded like his own skin, branches like veins against a stone-gray sky. They creak and groan like old bones.  Just prune the limbs, he’d told his son. No need to uproot the whole damned thing.  It’s older than he is by two decades, a relic of halcyon days…

It started with a scratching noise, the kind that makes you think of rats or maybe a trapped bird. But then came the thumps, heavy and deliberate, like something pacing above us. My father, never one for superstition, climbed the ladder one night with a flashlight in one hand and a cigarette in the other.…

He’s twenty feet tall, easy. People say ogres don’t grow that tall, but people don’t know. He also wears glasses and calls them spectacles like he’s forgotten what century it is. His house is a converted silo next to an abandoned barn on a former cattle ranch. The cattle are long gone and were delicious.…

The teen disco was on Chestnut Street, the part of downtown that sold 10k gold doorknocker earrings and Fila sweatsuits. The mannequins in the women’s clothing store windows wore pastel polyester suits, much like the one I wore that Easter Sunday. Mama told me the cuff on the wide leg pants was fashionable, but the…

Alone in the rectory, on his cot at night, while the sugar maple groaned and a branch struck his window—there, he nursed a private fear. That if he fell in the shower or passed in the night, no one would find him for days.  Maybe all those years ago, the priest wasn’t scared of a…