Issue 6: Summer 2025

  • Strawberry Box

    THERE IS A HOUSING SHORTAGE. We are encouraged to consume Canadian produce. And the federal government is contemplating modular housing. The year is 1941. Since Canada entered the war two years prior, a lot of changes have taken place at home. Factories producing war equipment have popped up in city suburbs across the country. Thousands…

    Found in:

  • City of the Dead (or The Last House on Winchester Street)

    MEMORY IS A FRAGILE and malleable thing. How is it that we remember some insignificant fact or interaction for an entire lifetime, while other events disappear into oblivion, calved off like chunks of ice from a glacier, to float away and melt as if they had never existed? Most of our life experience falls into…

    Found in:

  • The Way to the Hills

    IT WAS 6:42 A.M., and I was sitting in the dark, waiting for the first fragment of dawn to put an end to that interminable night. When the first mustardy glow bounced off the neighbour’s window and rolled into the kitchen, it lifted from nothingness a pile of dirty dishes and reminded me of the…

    Found in:

  • Tiger Teeth

    MY FAMILY USED TO RENT a cottage at Sauble Beach every summer. It was a shack really, with uneven floors, drafty windows, and plumbing that sputtered, farted, and screeched every time the water was turned on. But to me it was paradise. I’d wake up every day to the smell of water and sand, with…

    Found in:

  • Precious Things

    For Indigo V. THE DAY I STOPPED CRYING, my ex-wife, Kate, made a particularly cruel remark, immediately putting my resolve to the test. “Are you going to start crying?” she’d hissed when I’d told her about Dani’s name change. “You’re probably happy now anyway.” Dani was already in the truck, wedged between the twin babies…

    Found in:

  • Tobermory

    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.…

    Found in:

  • Antler

    ONE SATURDAY, about two in the morning, I woke up to this scratching sound outside. Below the bedroom window and a little ways off, but not far. I sat up in bed and listened. Lindsay, still asleep next to me, evidently hadn’t heard it. The sound filtered through her puttered breathing, and through all the…

    Found in:

  • Loretta Sasaki

    “YAKU!” MOM EXCLAIMED, a look of pure triumph radiating from her face. Her eyes had that delightful twinkle that I had not seen in months, if not years. Since I had moved her to The Plaza, an assisted-living facility in the Punchbowl neighbourhood of Honolulu, I’d never seen my mother looking so elated, so self-satisfied.…

    Found in:

  • Grounded

    ALTHOUGH SCHEDULED to depart that Sunday morning at 7:50, the passengers of Flight 1155 were not permitted to board the aircraft until 10:25, and since all had complied with the new security protocols at considerable inconvenience, arriving at the airport at least one hour ahead of the flight’s scheduled departure, the collective mood as they…

    Found in:

  • The Flight

    FAR AWAY IN THE SKY, above clouds and birds, the plane flew out of Ramya’s reach. Whenever Kartik and Sharanya shouted her name while rapping their rickety wooden window from the outside, Ramya knew they either had to fill pails from the well and milk the cows, or someone had seen them stealing coconuts from…

    Found in: