When you are seven, you will learn that a boy chooses dare over truth every time. Let’s play a game, they say, and you run your palms nervously down your key-lime shirt. The fabric sticks to your hands and stretches down—the dense, heavy fabric the early two-thousands were made from. All the boys talk about that one girl, Katrina—so wild she dared someone to lick honey off her giant boobs. Their eyes are jumping with the talk, flaming with a hunger you do not feel. They’ll dare themselves to kiss you. There are no rules to break, and you are your body but your body is not yours. Read more →
In the evening courtyards of a beautiful city in Sicily, I surrendered my appetite. I discovered the crush of a ripe tomato, and I did so with my fingers before my tongue. I’m sure I was not the first to pick up the secrets of Syracuse tomato sauce in the dark. When I finally consumed it, licking my lips of tomato and wine, it was like kissing the hand of everyone at the table. Read more →
The big comb is ocean-colored, made of hard plastic. There’s a photo, somewhere in our apartment, of me, aged eighteen months and in a diaper, holding the comb in my tiny hand, my hair a forest from birth. This comb is, apparently, a family heirloom, like the dining table with the paint flecks and peeling glaze, and the full-length mirror. My grandmother used this comb in my mother’s hair, and my mother used it in mine. Read more →
The first fire escape was developed in 1784 by Englishman Daniel Maseres: a rope, attached to a window, anchored to the ground with a heavy wooden platform from which one flee from a burning ledge. In 1877, R.H. Houghton created knots tied into a rope to create a flimsy mock ladder. Then Philadelphian Anna Connelly invented the iron fire escape bridge in 1887, which connected buildings to each other, allowing those in a burning structure to safely hop over to the next. Read more →
Kitsilano – Summer 2015: The small plain stucco box of a house has little Kitsilano charm; unlike other houses in this Vancouver neighbourhood, with their gabled roofs, bright wooden shingles and Craftsman detail. Drawn white blinds neatly cover the windows, indifferent to the street’s colourful gardens and diverse canopies of trees. Though there are solid new trellises rising above the backyard fence—someone in residence making improvements, intending to stay put. Read more →
I could smell the cigarette smoke before I could see him. A few steps closer, and I could see the shadow of his cane.
He sensed me coming through the trees. Before I could say anything to him, my grandfather said, “Be quiet. Stand Still. Listen carefully.”
So I stood still, quite aware that I could not be as still as him. When my grandfather decided to be still it was as if he had subtracted his body from the air.
I listened. I could hear my grandfather drawing on the eternal cigarette in his mouth. Read more →