It was my forty-first birthday and I was angry. Out for blood. My husband Del had given me a knife and a pillow, gifts that proved he’d been paying attention.  The gifts were wrapped in shiny paper and skillfully tied with matching silk ribbons. Wrapped by some sales associate, I imagined. Some young woman who…

They led a half dozen of us into the sacristy and told us that the world had ended. It was the pastor, the deacon, and a couple of the Eucharistic ministers, and they were passing a very official looking letter back and forth between them as they spoke. It was clear they were trying to…

The day he gets the tattoo changes everything. He hasn’t stolen the book. All the matron has to do is call the librarian, who loaned it to him—without a card—knowing how much he loves reading. Instead, she accuses him of theft. When he refuses to confess, she resorts to her preferred punishment: whacking the insides…

There was a spot of blood on the dog’s right ear. Scout, Sheila’s pride and joy, was so unnerved by her erratic driving that his little body flitted about only long enough for her to notice the red dot in her rearview mirror, but not long enough for her to snatch him up and examine…

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…