ESTEPHANOUS WAS BORN midway through fall and each year he would mourn the transition to winter with a birthday cake and candles. This year he drove up the 400 towards Sudbury in a rental far too big for him and his wife Heidi, leaving behind the straight lines and jagged edges of Toronto’s concrete skyline. Two hours deep into the country, the sight of big city buildings and the gleam of sun off glass five hundred feet above had well passed and all before them on either side of the highway were deciduous trees, red oaks and maples and the occasional magnolia. Their leaves had turned a deep auburn and had started to fall about them.
Steph and Heidi had made it a tradition to drive out to a place they’d never been to on his birthday weekend and explore new land. At night, they’d go back to their motel room and talk through the hours of all the places they’d seen and things they’d done, until their words inevitably failed them and Steph could only fill the void of the comfortable silence by reaching for a kiss. So many moons had passed since then.
Sixteen years they’d been together and thirteen years they’d been married. Thirty-two different cities and towns they’d explored by Steph’s count. Today, they would drive up to visit Steph’s mother at his childhood home in Barrie before they made their way northwest to Tobermory with a few pieces of snorkelling gear in the trunk. Heidi had signed
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Mina Athanassious is a Coptic Canadian writer living in the GTA. His first book of short stories, A Face Like the Moon (Mosaic Press, 2018), was positively reviewed on its release. He was granted several awards from the Ontario Arts Council for She-Bear, his current novel which is a work in progress. A perpetual student, he obtained his MFA in fiction and is working towards a PhD in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He teaches writing at several colleges and universities in Toronto.