When she picked me up from arrivals for the first time, she was wearing a soft jeans-coloured overall amounting to little more than a tank top and shorts. Her bare arms and legs were golden brown, her breasts girl-like, free from constraints and, from what I could perceive, evenly tanned. It was the summer of …
Grandma always said the best apple pie starts with fruits with the sharpest bite. My house is filled with Christmas carols, bright and clear in digital remasters. We always made pie with old scratchy records, some long-forgotten Canadian band singing Auld Lang Syne. The oven is preheating, and I can hear her reminding me how …
A strange sound woke me around two in the morning. I lay listening for a while. A human cry, forming unintelligible words, repeating them after a pause and getting louder. I slipped out of bed and went into the living room. Padded across the cool tiled floor to the open window, lifted the blinds and …
TW: This flash deals with sexual assault. Not all men, although there was that time when that reptilian managing director pulled me oh-so-close, ran his scaly fingers though my hair and underneath my top, hissed when I told him I had a boyfriend. I heard the others describe me as just another one of his …
Mother has latticed wings, translucent tinted amber, sectioned like leaded glass in church windows. Her flight is poetry, lyrical, beautiful, full of grace, deadly. She kills on the wing, takes prey in taloned limbs, rips off wings and devours it headfirst. Harnesses the wind, owns the air. The physics of her flight is art and science. She hovers, darts and …
It’s almost Halloween and the guesthouse owner has embraced the season with a ghoulish fervour, but it’s clear we have different perspectives on creepy. I tiptoe past pumpkins, a scarily unconvincing cat, waft past webs of spiders, store-bought rather than spun from neglect in my normal haunts. This is not a hotel in a hostile …
Monogamy is buying a gun and watching your lover swallow all the bullets. This is what Leigh Chadwick thinks as she lies in bed, listening to the thunder outside her window. It’s night, late enough to almost be called morning. A streak of light cracks through the blinds. Whenever Leigh Chadwick sees lightning, she imagines …
Wearing white is like carving a bullseye on our bodies, inviting men to spray us just so they can peek at our nipples or the floral etches of our bras, which means the first rule is never to wear white, light pink, or the soft yellow of newborn chicks. While it’s better to steal one …
Every night, my little boy repeats the same things before we leave his room. ‘Cuddle and kiss before you go to bed.’ He tugs my arm towards him, neither of us ready to let go. I kiss his forehead, searching for the scent of his skin, the post-bath softness of him, still unblemished but for …
Horace is twisting again, under my skin. I cup my hand on my pelvis under the candy-striped sheet in the saggy double bed in my parents’ best spare room. My nearly-new husband’s hand joins mine. “Anything to report?” Only the ache. It is hard to recall yesterday’s ache in enough detail to compare it to …
The flesh on his arms, like an overripe banana, peels as I drag my nails upward. Ribbons of crimson appear – thin, jagged trails on his skin. He doesn’t just yell – he shrieks. Not my older brother at all anymore but some strange, feral creature, crying in outrage. His knees spring back from my …
Maybe it had been six months since I followed you out west. Maybe it had been nine. We lived in the little apartment overlooking main street in that sleepy mountain town. I’d watch cars pull to a stop at the light outside the window and think, what the fuck am I doing here? You sold …