They said true to size so I went a half size up. Still they fit like a glove. The third toe on the left made some noise about that. I’ve only recently been able feel them again, my toes.
Some commenters called them moon boots but I think they’re actually supposed to look like kamiks. I guess the platform is pretty out there so I’ll call them moon kamiks. It might as well be the moon up there, the way people talk about it. The platform is thick white and jagged like a cartoon shark’s mouth. Real kamiks aren’t made out for the salt and the kind of ice we have down here. Instead of hide, it’s made of a kind of sleeping bag, lined with microfleece (fur). On each side there’s a pearly little patch of camouflage that looks like ringed seal. A suggestion: call the colour “seal” instead of “quarry.” (Although I suppose there are quarries up there, along with pretty much everything else.) Read more →
In the stairwell, he said hello to the pictures. They were all generic décor-shop prints, some flowers, some ships. But he said hello to all of them every evening before going in, a ritual that brought him calm, made him feel something like a boy again. There were never any names; just, hello, hello, hello. Read more →
The high arch over the entrance to the Vancouver train station divides the sign running along the roof in two. To the left the letters spell out Pacific, to the right, Central. Although it works out to the same number of letters on either side, the run of slender lines in the ifi in Pacific makes true balance impossible. Whoever built the sign spaced out the letters on the Pacific side to the same width as the more compact Central. This does not so much compensate for the sign’s inherent asymmetry as it does abstract it back into an evasive dissonance. Read more →
She knew what they called her when she wasn’t there: Steak Diane. They were calling her that right now, as Diane imagined they had done countless times before. The barmaid began in a low whisper directly into the bartender’s ear, as if to a lover in a shared bed. “Steak Diaaaaaane.” Suddenly called to duty, the bartender tied a mottled bar rag around his head and began to limp theatrically around the bar. As if she actually looked like that, thought Diane, as she readjusted the knot of her scarf, which rested—tight as a noose—at the base of her chin. Read more →
This issue invites the reader into worlds that exist between the visible and invisible, the public and private, the living and the dead. Revealing glimpses into the lives of five different female narrators, these stories introduce us to the spectrum of hyper-visibility and invisibility that frame women’s lives and environments. Read more →
I found myself travelling to South Australia as a buyer for Mark Anthony Wine Merchants—nice work if you can get it, as the song goes.
The position with Mark Anthony’s, which I no longer hold, was acquired partially thanks to a Wine Lovers Magnetic Poetry kit I picked up at a yard sale along with a croquet mallet and the game Operation that incredibly had almost all the tiny plastic body parts except for the funny bone. During my interview I mixed and matched the words I’d spent the weekend making haikus with on my fridge Read more →