She keeps setting a fourth plate at the table. No one comments anymore. Her mother clears it like clockwork. Her father eats in silence. Her sister rolls her eyes but never removes it. Even the dog sits by that chair, tail still. It started a year ago. After the accident. After the quiet ambulance. After the unlit candle at the funeral. She set the plate the next morning, and the chair exhaled, not a creak, but something deeper. Like memory stretching. At  first, she tried to

The government is replacing people with Replicants. They got to Carter a couple nights ago—when I woke up, I knew it wasn’t my fiancé lying beside me, even though it looked just like him. I wondered whether they’d programmed the thing to think it was really him before I slid my gun out from under the pillow and blew half its head off. That’s how I discovered that Replicants are organic. Fake Carter looked human, right down to the blood and brain.  I didn’t cry because I knew

The first thing I notice the ammo room smells peppermint; normally a soothing scent but now I find it offensive.  “Who’s the asshole?” I murmur. “What are you jabberin’ over there?” a cracked hoarse voice barks from the dark. It’s the old sergeant, Half-Brain Marc, he’s probably taking his usual afternoon snooze in this godforsaken place. I sniffthe air again. “Some clown must’ve sprayed peppermint here. Who’s got the twisted mind to do something like this?” “Peppermint!” Mar

The machine came in a box without instructions. No label. Just a black mark where the sender’s name should have been. It looked like a cross between a cassette deck and a bread maker. I had to drag it upstairs on a towel. The first time I plugged it in, nothing happened. No hum. No light. Just the bite of ozone, like air after lightning. It didn’t have a screen. Just a narrow slot and a tiny embossed label beneath it reading: handwritten only . I tried a grocery list. A recip

The girl who swallowed coins Let’s say the first five pence went down between handfuls of popcorn. As Elizabeth’s teeth hit metal, it was a do or don’t, spit or swallow moment. Let’s say she calculated the risks of this coin getting lodged or causing mischief at the other end and found them within tolerance limits. She swallowed, thinking of Carmen, the precise lines of her bob, the moon pebble perfection of her teeth when she laughed.  The next evening, she gulped down an

A child steps into an orange grove.  Not realizing it, he continues to strut along.  I am sorry that I can’t explain to you my dear why the earth does its magical things.  But at that very moment, an orange broke from the tree and made home for the boy’s head.  This snapped him back to earth’s beautiful reality.  Coming to sense where he was, the boy began to smell the delicious fragrances, and the beautiful state of all of the oranges.  Not one was rotten or miscolored.  All

Before you stopped talking, you told me you were nervous about what might happen to you in the days or hours leading up to the end. It was the only time the two of us talked about your impending death without dancing around the pale, cold particulars of it.  “I want you to promise to remember me this way,” you told me, sitting up in bed. “Not in my pajamas obviously, but I want you to remember me how I am right now and not what I might be like in a few weeks or whenever this

We are waiting for our flight.  We are a group of four (the Beatles but worse): Alan, Susie, Paul, me. We are playing eye-spy and two-truths-one-lie and all manner of exciting games. We are attempting handstands.  We are still waiting for our flight. We are researching the history and etymology of goldfish on Wikipedia.  We are eating all our food, a royal buffet of sandwiches and apples and salted almonds. We are talking to an old lady—she is going to Malta to spread her hus

Olivia has seen pictures of the men. Pictures in the big brown book on the glass coffee table at Opa’s house, along with lots of letters that made words underneath them, words she can’t read because she’s only five and in kindergarten and just learning her ABCs. The pictures are of her ancestors,  Mommy says, and Olivia practices saying it, an-ses-ters , a funny word that slithers and squirms on her tongue like a rattlesnake and makes her laugh because that’s a lot of s-es. 

My friend has written a poem about a pair of deer—one with antlers, the other without. In the poem, they are in a cemetery filled with green grass and large trees. The antlered deer fixates on the poem’s speaker. He watches her with his whole body. And the antlers too: like antennae reading the air for threat. She is no threat. And, the speaker claims, the deer determines that.  My friend loves deer and wants a tattoo of one on her shoulder.   We are talking about deer and w

It hovers in the sky like a baby killer whale. I avoid day light because at night it’s harder to make out, but it’s still unmistakable....

You’re eight and at a Pick-Your-Own farm in Southern Ontario, the sun pressing down the part in your hair until it feels like one long...

A dog-eared rag of duct tape flaps on our plane’s wing outside my window as we take off; my cell signal falling away with the earth,...

Remember the night we fell in love? A pebble beach under us, stars above.  I leaned in to kiss you and tasted beer and sea salt. Lying on...

You've never known what it felt like to fuck someone like you hate them. She tries her hardest to convince this stranger dressed as a nun...

You ask to stop at the café, that pretty little one on Berry Street, because you’re thirsty and need caffeine, and I ask you if I’m...

Amy talks to the space behind the refrigerator now.  And she only wears blue. When her mother dresses her in the morning, any unblue...

He sat next to the elderly pilot’s hospital bed, hand raised in absolution as he read from the approved script: “Benevolent spirit,...

If only you could pretend you don’t care about the superficially courteous relationship with your in-laws who also pretend to have risen...

The detainees in the large holding cell appear rather harmless, probably students, laborers, middle-aged professionals. If anything, I...