Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
When I was seven, I ran home from school every day so I could watch Batman foil one of the criminals who routinely plagued Gotham City. As often as not, Batman didn’t have to do anything because his bungling foes got caught up in their own schemes at which point Batman, played by the inimitable…
Note to Reader: This story is 4,100 words and takes about half an hour to read. Although the characters share names with me and my wife, these are fictional characters. That should be apparent from the fact that the fictional David Barker is tall and lean. David Barker, tall and lean, beige sport jacket draped…
I sat chilled and stinking and anxious and repeated it to myself like a mantra: Fuck the police. Fuck the police. Fuck the police.
The kid pulled off his jacket and, with an exaggerated flourish, hurled it into the crowd. Underneath, he had two octaves of black and white keys tattooed across his chest and the words: “Scales are for pussies!” As if that weren’t enough, he had “Fuck Hanon” in block letters between his shoulder blades.
Most often we speak of colonization as the incursion of a people onto a land that doesn’t belong to them, and the seizure of its resources, but before that comes the mastery of the subject people’s minds.
While she waited for the water to boil, Amanda stared at her tiny head reflected back to her in the curved metal surface of the kettle, and she considered that maybe her life was beginning to feel as warped as it appeared to her in the kettle.
The thing is: this worry is not something that happens in my head. Whatever happens in my head is only a symptom of something more pervasive that overwhelms my body. I feel it in my shoulders. By the end of a day, it feels as if I’m carrying a massive weight that bows me down.
Polar Vortex, Shani Mootoo (Toronto: Book*hug, 2020) Polar Vortex opens with a dream. Priya, a lesbian of Indian descent, immigrant from Trinidad, now settled with her white spouse, Alex, in white bread Prince Edward County, awakes from the riotous colours of an Indian wedding ritual which culminates in sex with a man, not with any…
Barnabas Moynahan woke from his coma. Nurse Lydia was the only person to witness the moment. She was standing at the foot of his bed and was staring at his eyes when they flickered open. Everyone important had gone home for the day, so Nurse Lydia had no one to tell.
Apart from the tire swing, there was nowhere but the ground for Herman to sit, so he spent most of his waking hours with his legs thrust through the middle of the tire, winding himself clockwise until he could go no further, then unwinding counterclockwise until the spinning nearly made him vomit.
William had been brooding about it ever since he saw that tabloid photo of Harry holding the sleek phone to his ear. Now that he was off to America, Harry seemed to get all the good toys.
Garth Kaminski ascended to the throne on May 7th, 2019, the day on which the lead story on all the major television networks declared that Josh Hannon had died and on which the top trending Twitter hashtag was #worldsfattestman.
Ma used an agent named Helga Heimlich who showed up one morning to make sure I cleaned everything proper. There’d be no cockroaches, no bed bugs, and no half-smoked doobies on the balcony, not on her watch.
The protagonist goes by the name Louise. I don’t know much about Louise that isn’t obvious: she is a black woman in her mid-thirties. She may be a lesbian.
I was taken aback. We had been loyal customers for years, paying thousands of dollars in premiums. How could they deny our claim—not even our claim, but the right to make our claim—based on what was, after all, a simple technicality?