Excerpt from Psychic Lectures | Lee Suksi

You’ve felt like this since you became conscious at four years old. Always rushing to smother your sibling with a blanket to protect them from the cold. You can be too much. You want with an adrenal magnitude. You want the squares of sky in between the skyline, you want the sweet young trees, you want the girl bent over on the side of the passing bus, orange juice, pie and big drinks of wine.

Toronto 488 | Aaron Kreuter

That night, I feverishly read through the novel, sitting at my mother’s kitchen table in the dark, my cup of coffee long cold beside me. This was it. This was what I had been trying to do for all those years. The novel’s characters grew up in Jewish Montreal in the sixties and seventies, moved to Toronto in the eighties, bringing with them their dramas, their prejudices, their recipes, their joys.

Postcard From the Edge | Sara McAulay

I closed my eyes. The narrow rocky trail. The deep, deep canyon. My stomach reeled. No guardrail, no parachute, no wings, and me with no terminal illness. Me, weaker than I’d ever suspected I could be. “How soon? I’ve got deadlines. Could we wait till Fall?”

She laughed again, then coughed, coughed again, her whole frame wracked. “For you,” when she could speak, “for you, I’ll buy a postcard.”

Cigarette | Gemini Wahhaj

She watched him from the back, the red glow of his cigarette a lone light against the black sky. Sometimes, she went out to join him, hastily dressed in a cotton kamiz and shalwar, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. He turned around and gave her a smile with his stained yellow teeth, then turned back to gaze at the street below with his large, almond-shaped eyes.