Goose: An Annual Review of Short Fiction 2013-2014

GOOSE

WITH STORIES BY

Melissa Cederqvist Jerico Espinas Chris Gilmore

Terese Mason Pierre

Volume 3

Carly Haspel

Anne Rucchetto Sarita Sanchez AN ANNUAL REVIEW OF SHORT FICTION

Volume 3 路 Spring 2014 2014

GOOSE An Annual Review of Short Fiction

Volume 3 // Sping 2014 Produced at Victoria College in the University of Toronto

GOOSE An Annual Review of Short Fiction

Volume 3, Spring 2014

MASTHEAD President and Editor-in-Chief: Michelle Speyer Vice-President and Editor-in-Chief: Jessie Yao Creative Director: Wenting Li Secretary: Tonya Sutherland

Editorial Board

Contributors

Elizabeth Ching Andrea Davidson Emily Deibert Zareen Din Alexander Pytka Alyssia Ramos Michelle Sraha-Yeboah Divna Stojanovic

Melissa Cederqvist Jerico Espinas Chris Gilmore Carly Haspel Terese Mason Pierre Anne Rucchetto Sarita Sanchez

Cover Illustration and Design: Wenting Li Printing: Coach House Press Copyright Š Contributors 2014

CONTENTS

Letter from the Editors Layers it must be beautiful Noises Playing Hooky Wasabi Constriction Writer’s Block The Three Lil’ Pigs Contributors

4 Anne Rucchetto Carly Haspel Terese Mason Pierre Melissa Cederqvist Jerico Espinas Terese Mason Pierre Chris Gilmore Sarita Sanchez

6 10 16 19 25 29 33 36 39

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

When we first sat down in August and talked about this year’s publication of Goose, the first question we asked ourselves was, “What should our literary journal contain?” Aside from short stories, that is.

This is a question that haunts all purveyors of quality literary work. This year we selected an emphasis on the avant-garde — not merely in the formal sense, but in all senses experimental. The stories in this year’s edition of the Goose reflect the range of experiences and imaginative moods that suffuse students’ lives; you will find within these pages the tragic and the comic, the rational and the absurd, the plainspoken and the obscure. Not surprisingly, the diversity of the subject matter gives rise to diverse innovations to the literary form of the short story.

In the Goose, student writers experiment with one of Canada’s most prolific and internationally acclaimed literary exports. 2013 has been hailed as the year of the short story in the international press, as a result of Alice Munro’s worldfamous Nobel Prize win this past December. Through annual publication of the Goose, we hope to spread awareness of new developments in the form of the short story from our grassroots perspective, to continue probing the porous boundary between prose and poetry, and to stimulate dialogue about some of

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our university’s best and brightest new writers. While not every year can be the year of the short story – we have to give the poets and the novelists their time to dazzle, after all – this year is our year, and we invite you to read along with us and to rediscover the joy of the short story and the pleasure of the printed text.

We are glad to introduce the 2013-2014 edition of the Goose. We would like to acknowledge all who braved submissions and we congratulate the selected writers on their thought-provoking contributions. As a team, we sincerely believe that the publication of student work is valuable and must be continued in the years to come.

We especially thank the members of the Editorial Board and Executive team who dedicated their time and experience to the journal; without these individuals’ enthusiasm, this publication could not have come together. Our Creative Director Wenting Li has been an invaluable asset to the team, as well, and we thank her for the many hours she devoted to designing this book and other materials throughout the year.

Finally, we want to extend our sincere thanks also to VUSAC and Victoria College for providing our club with the resources required to publish the journal.

Michelle Speyer & Jessie Yao Editors-in-Chief 2013-2014

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

5

LAYERS Anne Rucchetto

Teddy dead. Afternoon sun cast a cruel, white brightness over unsheltered ground and walls, making exiting the car unbearable. Nature’s interrogation, thought Dave with a sneer, slamming the van door and then throwing open the trunk with such force the car eased up, then down like a see-saw. His starched yellow shirt struggled to contain his stomach, arms, and double chin. He bent over and propped his knuckles on the edge of the car floor, leaning in and regarding Teddy’s box with suspicious eyes. The flaps and corners were frayed.

The cardboard was soft with damage.

Shoving his fingers under the box, Dave hauled upwards and smashed it against his belly, surprised at the weight it possessed. More trash. More clutter.

More things for Peggy to decorate the house with. Their house was small as it was, and with his mother-in-law’s recent move to the retirement home, the house resembled an unfinished puzzle: walls crammed to the ceiling with boxes of varying shapes, none quite fitting together. “Just one more painting,” Peggy implored last Saturday as she defiantly hung some abstract eyesore from her childhood living room. She had memories to love, to hold onto, to cherish. Teddy dead. But as a result the whole house smelled like her mother’s place, and at least half their belongings were hand-me-downs. It stirred in him an embarrassment mingled with unshakeable jealously.

In their worst fights he would demand, his voice coated with scorn, “When are you going to grow up? You’re almost fifty and you still act like a child. One of these days I’m going to throw all this garbage in the trash where it belongs.”

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Those words always got to her, but she knew how to catapult back. She unhooked the latch to his most destructive and bitter consciousness with the skill that their twenty-year relationship had taught her. “At least I have a childhood worth remembering,” she’d hiss, giving him a stinging look. That was usually when things got broken… and so on. When they had started renting movies instead of actually going out to see them, he and Peggy had stopped teasing each other for fun.

Dave part-strode, part-lurched to the stairs of his veranda and sat on the cool cement steps. He regarded the wilting vine at the side of their back-split, losing its leaves from October chill. He looked over his shoulder and into the face of his eighteen year old son, peering out from his bedroom window. Dave ventured a small wave. Scott closed his blinds with an abruptness he could have only learned from his mother. Dave considered going inside. He knew what he would find. Scott’s music, vibrating through the walls. Peggy, spread across the leather couch, chewing some snack as she talked to someone — anyone — on the phone. Sighing, Dave bent over the box he had placed upon his legs and wrenched open the flaps. Here’s as good a place as any. Might get some privacy.

Time to crack it.

He opened the box slowly and slipped his fingers inside, feeling for distinct objects among the tangled mass. His suburban street was characteristically deserted. The smell of his family’s garage surrounded him — a restless spirit.

Teddy was dead now. Dave’s face crumpled momentarily, a collapsed soufflé of sunburnt skin, wrinkles, and disappointment.

Dave felt before he looked. He reached down into the depths of the box and made contact with something that elicited a vaguely familiar sensation.

He lifted out the cool leather ball they had played shinny with. In his younger years, the game was a constant. He thought of the sun rising and setting, always on them playing shinny. The cul-de-sac across from their childhood home had been an ideal destination for their games. As close as he had lived to the water, the unpredictable scent of Lake Ontario, carried by frothing waves, pervaded his memory now just as strongly as it had pricked his nose during the days of his childhood. He squished his lips together in the replica of a smile. He had always been the best defence, blocking every path to the net. Man, that burned Ted up. Dave shut his eyes and let the sounds of a distant car engine distract him from his thoughts. He and Teddy had once been fair opponents. They had been unstoppable as a team.

They had been a great team. Dave’s smile deformed into a scowl. He thought about later. Remembered how it had been not six months ago.

“You can’t spare a few dollars for your own bro? Useless. Fucking useless!”

Teddy. As he became increasingly isolated, he had raged at anyone who ventured close enough to the tattered living room couch he spent most days sprawled across — his eyes rolling and his chest heaving. Dave would watch him warily from a short distance away, worried more about the vitriol that poured from Teddy’s mouth more than any of the physical outbursts to which he had once been prone. Most tasks required the ambition to sit up, stand, and walk, and as LAYERS

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time wore on, the one thing anyone could count on from Teddy had been his relentless, vocalized bitterness. After innumerable get-rich schemes, Teddy had lost his affinity for charming people and understanding the merits of genuine hard work — not to mention his job, his second wife, and the attention of his children.

“I can’t keep up with you, Teddy,” Dave would exclaim, hands raised like a cornered criminal. “You’re asking too much.”

“All you care about is yourselfves,” Teddy would slur. Dave recalled the yellowish drool running down the side of Teddy’s chin, unnoticed.

“Christ gave the clothes off his goddamn back for the needy, and they weren’t even his family.”

“I’m not Christ. And neither are you.”

These conversations had ended with ferocities dissolving into suppressed sobs and slammed doors. But now. Teddy dead. There would be no more fights.

Dave stiffened. He had taken this box. He had done his share. Pitched in for the funeral and the burial. Taken the majority of Teddy’s stuff to the dump and dropped whatever was worthwhile at Salvation Army. He’d helped enough to stave off his Aunt Lora’s nagging for a couple weeks.

Plunging his hand into a ripped pant pocket, Dave drew out a soggy handkerchief. The unsanitary habit of his father’s lived on in him, alongside other undesirable quirks like chewing on one side of his mouth and ripping out the bristly hairs that grew on his knuckles. Dave blew a wet nose and sighed. He reached for another object in Teddy’s box.

He felt rough fabric with his fingers and scooped it out with both hands. It was Teddy’s old hockey jersey, musty and damp. Dave’s eyes stung for a short moment before his attention was diverted by a hard object wrapped in the orange eyesore. Impatient, he thrust open the jersey. He recognized the misshapen lump of clay immediately. It was the replica trophy he had made for Teddy the night his team had lost the Pettigare Championship.

Their parents had offered no consolation, more sullen than some of the kids on Teddy’s team. “The better team won,” said their mother through lemonsucking lips. Teddy, with radishes in his cheeks, had retreated in silence to his room. His meek surrender had been uncomfortable for Dave. It was then that he had taken to pinching and prodding the dried-out ball of clay from the craft cupboard into the shape of a trophy. He had painted it gold with acrylics and had written on it as neatly as he could, Best Big Brother Teddy, in tiny letters. He remembered his offering with narrowed eyes.

He had knocked on Teddy’s door quietly. When he heard no response, he’d opened the door and had been startled by Teddy towering half a foot over him just within the room.

“What?” he had commanded sharply.

“Here,” Dave had said, with a weak smile, presenting his gift with an outstretched hand.

“What the hell is this?” Teddy had asked, turning the trophy in his hands.

“A trophy,” Dave had said warily.

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“Is this supposed to make me feel better?”

“Yes.” Teddy had tossed Dave’s offering directly into the trash. He pushed Dave into the hall and slammed the door.

Dave looked at the hopeful little trophy in staunch bewilderment. He saved it? Dave almost smiled. Why did he make like he threw it out? Caught between relief and hot outrage, Dave squeezed the trophy in his hand, gauging how much pressure it would take to break apart the whole thing. He slowly placed it back in the box. He put the box on the step and walked inside his house. He smelled apple crisp baking in the oven. His least favourite. He looked to his left, at Peggy sitting on the couch. Her posture was abysmal. She was talking on the phone.

Pam, she mouthed, turning her back to him.

He heard Scott’s grating music. Something with crashing symbols and heavy electronic bass. He walked the short distance to Scott’s door and pounded.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

“What?” Scott’s exasperated voice slipped under the door. Dave turned and walked silently to the kitchen. He would make tacos for dinner. Teddy on the ice.

Teddy in the hall.

Teddy on the couch. Teddy in the casket. Dave squinted as he pulled out the bag of onions. He remembered that phone call. Passed out. Asphyxiated. His heart banged in his throat like fists against a door. A mourner’s sigh escaped with each exhalation.

Smashing the onions on the wooden cutting board, Dave began slicing them slowly. Vengefully. His mind, rushing with silence, annihilated the noise around him. Peggy on the phone. Scott’s awful music. Teddy in the casket. He sliced the onions into slush. Sliced them into individual molecules. When Dave felt a hand on his shoulder he jumped, nearly cutting off the tip of his thumb.

“What?” he demanded, choking on dry grief.

“Why were you banging on my door?” asked Scott, irritated.

“That damn music of yours,” Dave tilted his head away from his son, studying his hands.

“You didn’t answer when I was calling,” said Scott slowly.

Dave half shrugged, heaving a deep breath.

Scott observed him in silence. He asked, wary, “Are you okay, Dad? Your eyes look pretty red.”

“Of course I’m okay!” Dave exploded, slamming the knife on the counter.

Peggy went quiet in the other room. “I’m cutting onions. What do you expect?

What are you, stupid?” The late afternoon sunlight fell sideways on Scott’s hurt grimace, a face marbled by shadows. Dave stared hard at the knife’s wet blade until his vision blurred. Until he heard Scott’s impatient sigh and retreating footsteps down the hall.

He hunched his shoulders, bent his head towards the counter, and let the onions sting his eyes.

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it must be beautiful Carly Haspel

to begin. to begin with a face. to begin with an arm and a face and a strand of hair. to begin with a smooth surface and an arm and a face. to begin again. the preparation is complete. to begin with a boy. to begin with a boy and if not a boy to begin with a man. there is safety in a boy and a girl and a man and a woman. there is discomfort in a boy that is not a boy and a girl that is not a girl. there is relaxation in a smooth surface and a strand of hair. don’t make a man a man. don’t make a man a sad man. don’t make him less a man. there is breakage in the construction and there is interference in the construction. the construction is complete. such a ruin such a new ruin such a fluid movement such a very very fluid moment there is modernity. there is science. there is process. there is hair loss. there is white-washed walls and four walls. there is safe. an enclosure ensures there is nothing left behind. an enclosure presupposes entrance. there is chaos spoken in a whisper.

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chaos breeds — such a man such a sad-hearted man such a sad slab of a man such a dry drab of manliness such a man such a man such a man and womanly comfort contained within comforting womanly walls “the other night i heard a scream out in the alley. i tried to follow the sound but when i reached the sound there was no sound. i walked towards the main road where the streetcar tracks lay in the road and the air above the road was murmuring. a dry hum of careful sound. i lay down in the road with the air thick with spoken ghost secrets. it was very dark. it felt like the words — had there been words spoken — were words spoken for me.” “the other night i’m at this new club out in the east end with a buddy of mine trying to get him laid the guy hasn’t gotten any action for months now. the girls are ugly but we have a couple a drinks and now i’m thinking i might get a piece tonight. ugly girls or not there’s this look in their eyes like they want it like they want it bad. after another drink my options start to look better and better. all of a sudden i’m standing talking to this girl who says she knew me in college just nodding along and maybe it’s the whisky but she is looking good and i’m getting really riled up i mean she’s already wasted wearing this tiny dress flipping her hair back and shit. and there’s like this primal smell in the air and i know she wants it and just as i’m getting real close to her close enough to tell her we should get out of that dump well her little friend swoops in, this real high-pitched chick with an underbite and before i know what’s good the two of them are gone. so i’m pretty pissed now i mean pissed in both senses of the word i slam back another drink and walk right up to the closest mediocre looking chick i can see and i look her right in the eyes so she knows i’m serious and i press her right up against the grimy ass wall and slide my hand up under her dress and get this she’s not wearing anything underneath i mean anything underneath so i start to finger her mashing my mouth against hers before she can make a peep. she’s really loose and i start to lose interest so i slide my finger out and make away. i don’t even remember what she looked like.” start again start with a clean and cleansing beginning clean is not a virtue but not sin IT MUST BE BEAUTIFUL

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tie two in a knot in a secure tightening embrace where one’s hands cannot crush please without repulsion please begin with a boy and not a boy and a girl and not a girl. begin with a man that is no man and a girl that is a man. the boy is the girl and the identity is replaced. this is not a virtue but not sin. this is dirty to known eyes who are startled to see it. two arms can reach. they will. “when i think of how it was it makes me want to crawl outside of my skin because the truth of what happened lies in my skin and it’s not safe in there anymore for me. i lie beneath thick covers with the window shut to sweat the truth out. i stay awake at night. i don’t close my eyes.” furnish a room without longing. walls do not need comfort or safety and especially not breakfast cereal. the appetite has changed. brokenness breeds a child not of birth. brokenness breeds brokenness. brokenness breeds — there is such a swift likeness vomited from the inner reaches of the pea-sized brain the intersection between flesh and flesh, flesh-death. the intersection between need and want the trajectory aimless, fecal scum skimming the surface. “rotten pseudo pretty attention-seeking bitch your subliminal existence rotten disgusting fucking whore cunt bitch goddamn addict i hope you live unhappily and die unhappily fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you loving you was the worst thing i let myself do i hope we rot entirely separately no you can’t don’t you dare show me even an ounce of affection i will kill myself and you are not allowed to care you fucking bitch you are not allowed to care” take off my shirt i undo all the safety i have learned passion is easy to dispense with in the right arms so lucky to be limbless. on a night like this

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even the moon protests the moon shine shimmer on shell-shocked streets the sigh the simmer the streets don’t know the absence of human feet a hierarchy, my love, but no it must be beautiful to be inanimate and craters carved in pavement by human screams (the moon can’t hear the human screams) only a human fate to know the end, and a human fate to end. on a night like tonight even the skin protests or cry out behind closed doors i can hear a ring-ing-ing-ing-ing i can hear you, mother ringing in the sleepless night in warning the streets do not cry only cave in (dry sepulchre-eye) in and upon themselves (tombstone upon tombstone) bodies buried among old misgivings should two arms reach the surface should the dirt give way should the grief recede should the body need and should we be absolved “i pepper the laneways with cigarettes grown red at the filters with lipstick drawn quiet as breath from my lips IT MUST BE BEAUTIFUL

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when we met you said i shouldn’t smoke i said god if i needed to hear that i’d call my parents every once in a while now i put on red lipstick every morning to remind you who you belong to i see you in the faces of strangers on the streetcar your voice in my head as i disembark asking when i’ll be home” how many times must we undergo rebirth to live as we were meant to. there is a beginning. there is a boy. there is a girl. there is a mistake in the construction. there is wholesome and cleansing and dirty and unsafe. must we seek forever in the bodies of one another what is ours by birth. body to body and body to body the embodied go seeking in another themselves the fabled physical fortune the abused microcosmology must we so soothe the soul into acceptance of an abstract truth we don’t know the name of. to begin. to mutter the sounds of the underbelly of the world. the whistling amorphous flow of delinquent sound lying under every tongue lest it be discovered and spoken in a whisper. lest it be contorted out of context by unpracticed tongues. must we squeeze every drop of language out of ourselves like it is a gift rightfully given. in time perhaps, the unity will be made effervescent and clear. there is hope in the unsung and the untouched and the unwilling. should the chaos spread. should the tone increase. should the body breathe. it will breathe it will breathe it will breathe — it will breathe. it will breathe. it will breathe. it is the beginning the thump the thump the rhythm is inherent in the form the heart beating in tandem with mother in vitro the wailing thrush of the blood the embryo grows and chaos embodied eats away at the boy and the boy and the girl and the boy that is a girl and the girl that is a girl

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shortened spectrum (the masculine and the feminine beat as one) dusk like a blanket (we are covered in dusk) there is no safety there. it crumbles in upon itself so long as it will breathe so long as it will breathe it will breathe “when i last saw you you looked like a body time had undone. there were nights and nights i asked myself why you would not come home and at last i realized it only felt natural for you to avoid the place where you might find love hidden. you only wanted what you would not find waiting and i was all the predictability you feared in yourself. maybe there was a way we could have stitched ourselves together with all the kind comfort needed to sustain two ailing spirits but there was never quite enough yarn. there was never quite enough. there was never quite enough. there was never quite enough. there was never quite enough —” thump thump thump thump thump thump

IT MUST BE BEAUTIFUL

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NOISES Terese Mason Pierre

Surely she had locked the back door. Yes, she was positive she had locked it. Yet the scratching, thumping sound that trailed from the kitchen disturbed her. This was interesting. She sat in her paisley easy chair, gripping the arms with a distinct strength and anxiety she never knew existed within her. Her legs were tucked under her, pale white at the knees. She stared down at her empty house slippers, her eyes darting across the wooden floor searching for any creature with the perverted audacity to venture into her home.

She listened carefully, but the alarming sound was distorted now, fading in and out, almost teasing. Should I, she mused, or should I not investigate? Her fears battled against her curiosity and yearning for adventure. Gradually, she dropped one leg and then the other. Her toes brushed the smooth oak panels, which were cool despite the hissing, blazing fire in the hearth. Chills ran up and down her spine like cold, slimy skeletal fingers. Of course it was unwise to ignore that feeling, but only because she hadn’t had that feeling in a very long time. She stood up and took one step forward. The floorboards creaked under her weight; it was a very old manor. The wind howled like a damned soul, and although the sound was slightly abated by the thin glass windows and the heavy velvet curtains, she knew something was out there, waiting for her to ignore her intuition and explore the dark and dangerous unknown.

She stilled herself: held her breath, set her jaw, strained her hearing. It was quiet for a moment, and then she heard it again: the distinct sound of wood cracking and splintering, coupled with firm, erratic thumping. The noise was real. It

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was outside her mind, and outside her home. Her home. She had to investigate.

She groped around for her robe, and when she finally found it on the floor, she slipped it over her shoulders and stuffed her feet into her slippers. As confident and intrepid as she wished she were, she flinched and froze at every sound, and she feared the moment when she would feel the ceramic tile under her slippers.

With trembling hands, she flipped the light switch near the kitchen doorway. The ceiling chandelier flickered to life. Despite the unsatisfactory light, she could make out everything in the large room. Marble and wooden counters lined one wall and curled into a small island. A circular table was at the back of the room, into which four beautifully upholstered cornflower blue chairs were pushed, bathed in a faint yellow glow. In between them was the kitchen door.

She took a step forward, shuffling her feet in cadence with the scratching and thumping that seemed to resume right as she approached the back door. A white lace curtain had tediously covered the window on the back door. Through the lace, in the light of the room and the shine of the pearlescent moon, she noticed, with heart-wrenching terror, a dark figure. She swallowed, her tongue feeling heavy and dry in her mouth, like a rag. She could almost feel her pupils dilating. She reached for the knife on the table. She gripped the handle and raised her right hand, inching toward the doorknob. The man — if it was a man — seemed to be hacking away at the edge of the door, perhaps at the lock, with occasional grunts and colourful profanities.

Her hand was on the doorknob now, her fingers tightening around the polished brass. She furrowed her brow and, with a startled gasp, she flung open the door. Cool air washed over her, along with the sound of chirping crickets, the hum of the occasional passing car, and the faint roar of the river, past her backyard, some hundred yards down the tree-covered hill. Other than that, no one was out there. She sighed, raising her hand to her pale throat, for she was absolutely sure that she’d heard someone. The knife slipped from her loosening grasp and missed the little toe of her left foot by mere centimetres. Her mind didn’t register the clang of metal hitting tile. She stepped outside into the dark, daunting night. A few stars were brave enough to shine amidst the dark firmament, like silver beads spilled on black silk.

She fumbled through the darkness, using her feet to find the steps heading down to the garden. It was a quaint and innocent place, with a wooden gazebo and stone fountain, but somehow, as she stared at it, it looked like a death-trap — a looming chasm from which dangerous and demonic entities could ebb and emerge and drag her by the ankles into their treacherous realm.

She blinked, her eyes searching. Her mind was playing tricks on her. It wouldn’t be the first time. Nonetheless, she was the only remotely humanoid creature out there. There were no burly men with guns or hatchets, no smiling clowns waving blood-soaked knives, no dark hulking figures that blended unsuccessfully into the surrounding shadows. She’d overreacted. She retreated to her home, her shoulders slumped forward against the cold.

She’d overreacted! How mortifying!

As she passed through the kitchen threshold, she suddenly remembered to NOISES

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turn on the porch light. She felt a bit smug as she did so, staring into the partially illuminated darkness. Take that, demons! She walked rather confidently back to her seat at the fireplace. She poked at the flames with an iron rod before settling back down in her paisley easy chair. The air seemed warmer now that her fears had subsided. And because the feeling of tranquillity enveloped her so tightly and clouded her senses, she did not hear the figure slowly making his way across the shingled roof.

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PLAYING HOOKY Melissa Cederqvist

I let myself into Jake’s house after no one came to the door. It was frigid anyway, and I’d been walking for about twenty minutes because the bus was late. I had to meet up with Kaylee later, and I knew she’d be pissed that I was seeing Jake, but I didn’t think I really had a choice.

The house was warm and stuffy inside and I saw a handwritten note from Jake’s mom addressed to me sitting on the stairs. I took off my shoes. All the lights were off, and as I turned some on Yelle immediately turned around on the sofa. The cat stared straight at me, raised her backside menacingly, and hissed.

“Fuck you, too,” I murmured. Seven fucking years. Stupid cat.

Jake was in the basement; the sound of gunshots and the pre-recorded groaning of dead guys punctuated the air when I entered. “Hey.” “Hey.” his gaze didn’t waver. “What’s up?”

“Nothing.” I walked over and sat on the other couch and we both just watched the screen until Game Over flashed over the image of a dead body. We sat in silence for a while longer, checking the score.

“Your mom called me,” I said with some irritation.

Jake didn’t say anything, but he looked at me with a mischievous grin hidden inside his shut mouth. “Really?”

It didn’t require explanation; we both knew he hadn’t been to school for a month. The only sign of life was when he showed up to write the final exams in December (hell knows how he knew when and where they were).

The teachers liked Jake enough that they didn’t mark him absent for the PLAYING HOOKY

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first week. They knew that when Jake skipped, it was probably to do something interesting. He liked protest marches, visiting the university’s medical department downtown, and playing the drums at open mics. He always talked back to most of the teachers in class — especially Mr. Lynch — but he was so excessively cheeky that he got away with it.

Jake was that tall lanky type and always wore starched shirts and an old green blazer so that he had the look of someone going somewhere. Jenny said he looked like “some crazy bohemian scientist.” When he came back to school, he usually brought a forged note that looked convincing enough that the teachers could just claim not to have noticed it was a complete fake. But this usually lasted a day or two, and now he seemed to be having a weeks-long meltdown right in the middle of final year.

“How’s Kaylee?” he asked with a smirk.

“She’s good. Just finishing her —“ “Man, fuck Kaylee.”

I was livid. “What the hell Jake, just let it go. I can’t even believe it. God damn it.”

“No, you let her go. She’s such a little bitch. I don’t even know what I did.”

The situation with Jake and Kaylee may make more sense if you picture a house in the middle of the night. It happened just last summer at a mutual friend’s place. The house was full of people and loud conversations, the sound of bottles clinking and drunk girls in tight dresses swaying on their skyscraper heels. Kaylee was outside lighting a cigarette and joined some other girls for more drunken swaying on the sidewalk. I arrived at the door of the house, passed our friend a heavy LCBO bag and started talking about something. A few minutes later Kaylee turned, saw me and with a big smile started making her way up the front lawn to the porch.

Suddenly there was a scream and a huge dark dog emerged out of the bushes, snarling angrily, and it lunged at her. It took hold of her shoulder and pulled both of them hard onto the cement.

At least that’s what she told me he looked like coming out of the bushes, through shivering sobs and complaining of a sharp pain in her ankle. Her dress was all ripped and a heel had broken, and Jake lay next to us on the pavement laughing his ass off like a fucking moron.

It took three months for her sprained ankle to heal but only eighteen hours for her to force me to delete Jake’s number and block him on Facebook. It didn’t do much good. I lived maybe five blocks away from him and I had his number memorized, so we ran into each other sometimes. We’d been friends for eleven years. Still, I didn’t see him for two months after that, but we shared a lot of classes when we went back to school.

“So what’s up man? Applying anywhere?”

The acidity was obvious in his voice, and I really didn’t want to go there but I guessed it was unavoidable. The deadline for our grade was in three weeks. “Yeah, accounting. Three schools.”

Jake broke out chuckling. “An accountant...”

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“Yeah,” I quickly added, feeling defensive. “Also Jazz at Humber. We’ll see if I get in.”

Our eyes met and his displayed a sympathetic understanding of my halfditched attempt to show that I was still me from grade eleven. Still like him: all irreverent, deliciously impractical. Hippy and stuff. “Nah, just go with accounting. You’ll make more money. It’ll eat your soul, but you’ll make more cash. The economy is shit right now anyway.”

I nodded and looked away.

We talked some more; he said he was coming back to class on Monday and couldn’t believe that his mother hadn’t bothered to ask before she called me, concerned and furious.

“Of course I’m applying; does she think I’m stupid?” he asked angrily, and we continued to snipe some guys until our hands sweated from holding the controllers so tight. I got a text from Kaylee, but I thought it would be best to reply later.

When the afternoon started getting long and the sky was darkening, we sat upstairs making hamburgers and talking about other things. I don’t remember half of it, but at one point Jake looked up from the tomatoes we were cutting and kind of stared into space, if only for a moment. He was always so present and self-possessed that it alarmed me a bit.

“What?”

He stopped staring for a moment, shook his head, and then went back to cutting up the tomatoes. “I just can’t believe we’re almost done grade 12.”

“Yeah,” I said. It was pretty weird and I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it.

I’d probably be staying in the city but Jake for sure wouldn’t. Kaylee was going to the States so I kind of worried about the long distance thing. I had a thousand other questions like how much money in student loans I’d need, whether to work this summer, if I should live on campus...

But I was cut off. “No, none of that bullshit. That’s not even what I’m talking about,” said the guy with a full-tuition scholarship kind of average, who mostly ignored girls entirely — especially if they liked him slightly — and whose Audidriving mother let him smoke weed in the house.

“Yeah, I guess not,” I said with an element of derision.

He must have picked up on it. “So you’re a pauper and I’m a prince?” he asked rhetorically. “You’ve got it so hard, Will.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Yeah it is... exactly.”

More uncomfortable than the sudden tension in the room between us was the theatrically increasing speed of our chopping with the long, thick knives.

Vegetables piled quickly.

“Yeah, I get it,” he grinned. “We all want to be people who are losing. We’re losing, we’re losing. Even though we’re winning, everyone on this goddamn continent, we want to be people who are losing because we feel like losers.”

“What are you even talking about? Just forget it.”

“I’m saying our whole class is full of shit. And the school just encourages it.

We think it’s the biggest deal. I can’t stand this year, where each and every one of PLAYING HOOKY

21

us is told to make some sort of Nirvana-seeking decision to spend all our money and time at some incorporated diploma-factory so we can work at earning it all back the rest of our lives.”

This time I was thinking so hard in order to say something that I nicked my thumb.

“Oh yeah, and don’t forget we’ve got to save the world. Each of us is going to be fucking Gandhi. And if you’re not going to be Gandhi, you’re going to go and study business and you’re going to be Steve Jobs. Do any of these motherfuckers understand that Steve Jobs didn’t even study business? He didn’t even finish school. Fucking dumbasses.”

“Yeah,” I said, warming up to his rant in many ways. At least I agreed with him. He was being uncharacteristically whiny, but I sort of got it.

“Anyway,” he said, with a sort of finality that was begging to sound selfassured. I could tell he had kind of gotten ahead of himself and was a bit embarrassed. “I’ll be there on Monday. I’m applying. My mom won’t call you anymore.”

I laughed.

It became very quiet except for the icy rain outside and the sound of his phone going off as he texted someone. It was probably Jenny; I could see he was smiling a bit. I had a bet going of ten dollars that they would hook up before graduation. Something distracted me, though, and it made it impossible for me to read the discarded newspaper I had in my hands as we waited for the hamburgers to grill.

It was stupid, but I wanted to say I missed him. I knew I wouldn’t say it, but I just couldn’t figure out why. We never talked or hung out anymore and I didn’t try to talk to him, or Kaylee and I would have had a fight. At least I had the fact that his mom called me as an excuse for this time. We didn’t share any classes next semester, and I probably would never see him more than to say hi.

And it hadn’t occurred to me before I blocked him that I didn’t really have any other close friends. Or at least ones I kind of respected. For the past five months, things had gotten worse between Kaylee and me. She would call me when she was drinking and we’d get into a fight. I told her I didn’t know who she was with, she told me to fuck off and stop controlling her. I felt like an asshole, but sometimes I just couldn’t sleep. Since grade eleven we had talked about staying in the city for university but in September she suddenly decided she was going to New York or California and I was supposed to be supportive. I really tried and I didn’t think she noticed how much I hated it. I just couldn’t figure it out.

She was so sweet when we were together, but over the phone and when she wasn’t there we always seemed to argue.

I stupidly thought it was like a little boat which had lost its way off the coast in a heavy fog, meandering for hours among tall dark waves before seeing some brilliant lighthouse beckoning it back to shore. I thought Jake — there with his starched shirt and grubby Adidas basketball shorts and leaning up against the cupboard with some girl’s text message in his hands — could help me. He always handled everything, he was always so composed. It was like there was a machine between his ears instead of what the rest of us had. Whatever he said to me, and

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whatever he said when he mouthed off at the school hall monitor, everyone knew he was probably going to be a Steve Jobs. Fuck it, he could probably be Gandhi if he could think about anything but himself.

We ate in silence and when we were almost done we heard a car door slam outside. His mom’s keys clinked against the front door’s keyhole and we let her come in before both replying to her elongated “Hello?”

“Hi, Mrs. Stewart.”

“Hi, Will. Oh, it looks like you guys have already eaten. I got us some pizza.”

“Oh damn, thanks, though, mom.”

His mom was a shrewd woman and she knew that when high school kids stand around the kitchen with someone’s mom, conversation gets really awkward really fast. She hoisted some groceries on the counter and whipped out her Blackberry as she left the room. “Jake, you’ll take care of the groc —” “Yeah, sure.”

A few minutes later, as I was leaving, I was quiet because I didn’t know when we’d talk next. I liked the silence. Jake’s presence was enough to calm me down and I knew I had an argument waiting as soon as I left.

“Tell Kaylee I said hi. She’s probably going to freak out that you were here,” he said casually, with a bit of a grin.

“Yeah.”

A long silence. “That’s messed up.”

“Yeah.”

Then I left. After I’d reached the sidewalk, I didn’t know it but we both reached for our phones. He was walking back towards the kitchen, and his had a picture that Jenny had just sent him with her breasts peeking suggestively out of a pink t-shirt. The accompanying ;) sent a titillating shiver up his legs and he pounded a reply on the keys as he headed to his room. Outside, I almost slipped on the ice. My phone didn’t have any new messages, but the last text Kaylee had sent me after I had told her where I was had ended in “whatever william. i don’t even care anymore.”

A few years later I remembered that afternoon, Yelle hissing and how oblivious I was that Kaylee had been planning on breaking up with me for a while already. She didn’t even do it that night, although I wish she had. The next few months were rocky and it wasn’t until a year later — when she was off in New York, New York — that we finally realized we hated each other. I thought about that afternoon when I was on the bus reading the ugly advertisements. I was in the middle of third year accounting but was switching to music, and I wondered whether I would have wasted all that time if I had just asked Jake. He would have predicted this. He would have predicted Kaylee.

About Jake I had been totally wrong. Jake stayed in the city and was on his way to being Stephen Hawking, not Steve Jobs. We still didn’t talk much and when I met his university friends I thought he must be the best-dressed person in the whole physics department. I was probably right. The girls all liked him but he never seemed to care until I ran into him a few weeks later and he showed me a picture of his girlfriend; he seemed rabid about her. She was kind of ugly, but PLAYING HOOKY

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I had always thought he saw things differently than the rest of us, and I envied him for that. It’s what made him see people as transparent, time as irrelevant, and rules as temporary, and though I tried many times to find whatever gave him that second sight, I never could figure out what it was.

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WASABI Jerico Espinas

“This is pain.” I drop my chopsticks and clasp my hand over my mouth. The green mountain erupts on my tongue and sends a pillar of steam up my nose. A few diners look my way as the splintery sticks clatter on the jade linoleum floor and land beside my purse. The attention makes my smoldering cheeks glow brighter.

“Why did you give me this?” I spit out the unraveling piece of sushi. The rice is a toxic green mush from all the wasabi.

“I thought you’d like it,” says Tina. She rips open a soy sauce packet with her teeth and pours the black liquid over my raw, pink salmon. She picks it up with her hands, raises it up high, and pops it in her mouth. She’s like a toy crane, picking up stuffed animals and dropping them down a chute into the arms of greedy children.

“I read that you’re supposed to breathe in and out of your nose really fast until the spiciness is gone.” She demonstrates the action, breathing quickly, in and out. Her nostrils flare. Her hands are molten glass balls. She’s in pain. But when she swallows, she’s barely blushing. I’m impressed, so I grunt in response.

I try to breathe in and out of my nose really fast too, but a grain of rice moves into my airway. I cough and shudder and Tina laughs in a surprised sort of way, her eyebrows shaking up and down like springs. She pats my back but I shrug her off.

I open a water bottle and rinse my mouth. A bitter aftertaste lingers above the numb smoldering on my tongue. The water doesn’t soothe the pain but it’s WASABI

25

better than choking.

I wonder, between gulps, why we’re eating half-price, late-night sushi at Wok Out, our usual afterschool hangout. Tina and I are supposed to be studying for our MCATs next month. We brought several prep books to review and a dozen practice tests to write; I’ve barely looked at any of them. Does she not care how screwed I am? She doesn’t, of course – but I knew that.

We first met in elementary school, back when cheerfulness and joy were mandated through iron nuns and wooden sticks. We both wore uniforms back then, black and white, straight and pressed, with shoes licked to a fierce shine. It’s no wonder, really, how we turned out in the end. We know each other’s quirks by heart, is what I’m getting at.

Take my study habits: my mind tends to wander when I read. Knowing this, Tina takes the time to make post-it notes on important chapters, instructing me to PLEASE LOOK CLOSELY in bold, red letters.

I knew right away that she wanted to talk by the way she was rubbing her lips forcefully when she proposed to grab sushi. She was kneading the flesh forcefully; she always does this when she’s nervous, when she has something to say but can’t bring herself to say it. I could tell that she just had another fight with a girlfriend. Her fingertips were now stained red. Faded lipstick remained, making her mouth look like an open wound when she spoke. So of course I said yes; how could I not? Even though I had barely cracked the spine of Book 1, Section A: Understanding Calculus.

I don’t know what she sees in these girls – all those sculptors and molders and builders. They only ever care about her physical presence. How she balloons in a party, her laugh filling up every crevice, suffocating everyone. Or the way her heart beats and thrusts, almost visibly below her skin, threatening to burst. It’s a shame, really, how superficial they’ve been.

There was one girlfriend, back in first year, who made soaps in her residence bathroom. She mixed them with tiny rocks, so that having a shower was no longer a mindless routine – you became aware of every scratch as you slid the bar across your skin. Apparently this special soap would shed the dead skin cells and reveal a perfect complexion underneath. I told Tina that the process wasn’t worth the thin scars they made on her body – she already had enough of those – but she found it surprisingly worthwhile.

“I doubt I will ever understand it,” I say.

“What’re you talking about, Angela?”

“How people can consciously hurt themselves,” I explain. I poke at the wasabi with my pinky and grind the garnish with my thumb. “This is pain, Tina.

There are pain receptors on my tongue sending pain signals into my brain. When is it ever good to feel discomfort?”

She smiles as if she has just accomplished something. “You just have to withstand the pain. It’s all part of the experience.”

She spreads some wasabi on a piece of sushi and eats it – pop! – just like that.

She purses her lips and blows out several streams of air, in through the nose and out through the mouth, as if she has just eaten a live coal. Her face is a light rose

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colour. “Be careful, though. Sometimes you experience the pain so much that you begin to enjoy it. Humans are a bit odd like that.” She winks. “And I think you mean capsaicin binds to the tongue’s VR1 receptors, sending action potentials along neural axons to the brain.” She slaps me lightly on the cheeks.

Whap. Whap. Whap.

“Um, right.” I grab Tina’s unused chopsticks and open them. I pick away at the fried mild dumplings that she ordered as an appetizer. They aren’t the store’s specialty, so they’re mostly tough, lumpy, and heart-shaped, but they calm my palate. Tina worked at Wok Out before, so her orders usually have something special in them. Not this time. “But still, you should have told me that eating sushi was dangerous from the start.”

Behind me, a party of two opens the door to leave. The storm outside sees the opening. The wind rushes in and unleashes a torrent of brisk mist on the back of my neck. I take a napkin from a table dispenser and dab the corners of my mouth. It’s enough to dry up what’s left of the conversation.

The trouble with Tina is that sometimes she just follows what’s in her head, and what’s in her head has mostly to do with Tina and very little to do with anyone else. So when it comes to things like social justice, human empathy and all that, she sometimes needs a bit of a reminder that there are other people in this world with needs other than her own. Like this one time when the ragged edge of a hurricane was heading towards our hometown, back when we were still in high school. I had to actually beg her to volunteer with me at the local Red Cross shelter. Her excuse? She had planned a celebration or something for months and she didn’t want it to go to waste. Like I said, she can be pretty selfish.

We met in front of the makeshift aid centre. She was wearing a red dress shirt and fitted black slacks. She wished me a happy birthday, rubbing her lips like usual. She eventually worked up the courage to kiss me on the cheek, though she was so nervous she hit my lips instead. I giggled; it was nice pretending to greet each other like fancy Frenchwomen. Thankfully, she was quick to laugh the kiss off.

Tina said she wanted to hand out food and supplies with me in the kitchen, but of course they needed her outside for when the storm finally hit. She actually protested, right in the middle of the shelter. I had to calm her down with everyone watching. It was awful, feeling all those eyes on us. She looked pained, like I had cheated her out of something – easy volunteer work, most likely. But she accepted her role there, in the end.

Our town was fortunate. We had seen the storm’s potential on the news from a neighbouring town: cars drowned, trees uprooted, families displaced. So we prepared. People were piling sandbags up to their necks, collecting buckets of sandy water, clearing the streets of debris, all to defend our poor town.

But when the storm arrived that day, the flood crashed upon our ankles and carried with it a forest of loose twigs and stones. The hurricane only grazed past us, avoiding any direct confrontation. So we did what we had to do. We mopped up the streets, disposed of the trash, and had a good party afterwards.

I like to think I am more considerate than Tina, that I am more attuned to WASABI

27

other peoples’ feelings. I can tell that Tina really wants me to try new things, as always, so I decide to grab a piece of the ginger, lather it in wasabi and pop it in my mouth, for her sake. I just needed to tease her a little, to let her know that this act was my charity.

Tina smirks as her hands move from her lips to the table. She is rubbing a metal No Smoking sign that someone has Sharpie’d over, creating a big red O with a straight divider separating two black continents. Her thumb moves between the semi-circles, smudging black ink on the line, bridging the two bodies together.

If I were one of Tina’s artistic lovers, I’d point to her right now and say something profound. I’d say something like, I love how easily you break down social conventions, and I’d point to the warning symbol and its faded red barrier like it meant something more than the sum of its parts. But I am not. And it is not. And Tina knows too well that the world is a cruel and complicated place to be fooled by those kind of words.

I take a piece of sushi from the platter and spread wasabi on the rice, using my chopstick like a cumbersome knife. I place the sushi on my tongue and force myself to chew. The tainted rice sears like hot coals, burning tiny holes into my taste buds. I brace myself and wait for the little embers to ignite into individual hell fires, but nothing comes. Only a light heat, campfire-hot.

Tina makes a puckered face and breathes in and out, but I don’t want to risk choking again. Instead, I take another sip of water and put out the fires, leaving only a layer of gritty ash on my tongue. A few tears form and I wipe them away with a napkin.

“Angela, you didn’t have to do that.” Her eyebrows are bouncing up and down again. I open my mouth, revealing nothing, and she smiles at me with halfpainted lips.

“No, you’re right. There was less pain and more satisfaction.” I drink more gulps of cooling water and set the empty bottle beside me. “I just had to suffer through it, like you said.”

“Well, I’m glad you understand me a bit more,” says Tina. She glances at her watch, and makes a face like she’s missed her favourite TV show. She begins to stack the sushi plates. “We better go. At this rate, I won’t have time to teach you derivatives.” She checks to make sure all our prep books are in her backpack and slings it over a shoulder with a grunt.

“Isn’t it still raining?” I walk behind her, making sure to check my purse for my wallet and phone before leaving.

“I’ve come to like the rain,” she says. “There’s something hopeful in it, don’t you think?”

Tina opens the door and stretches out her hands to welcome the storm, but is met with the dull, careless face of the moon instead.

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CONSTRICTION Terese Mason Pierre

Martin couldn’t fight any longer. He knew exactly what was happening. The life was being squeezed out of him, and there was nothing he could do about it. He gasped for air in the dark closet. Black spots danced before his eyes, and his bones creaked and shattered against the mass. Blood filled his trachea and pooled around his tongue. No one would find him here — he knew that.

As he took his last breath, he remembered his last days: Martin was a professional thief. But he was very particular about the people from whom he stole: rich tycoons, snooty heiresses, distracted stockbrokers. New York City was teeming with them, and the metropolis’s population of eight million gave him just the cover to slip away. The police weren’t concerned about stolen necklaces or watches when there were murder cases that needed to be solved, no matter how many times Martin’s victims pleaded.

Martin was stealthy. He’d sneak into the house in the middle of the night, disarm the system — if any — and took anything that was small and light. The very next day, he’d sell it to various pawnshops, under different guises, to prevent any suspicion from falling on him.

He’d grown up poor. His mother scraped every cent she had to send him to the only private school in his hometown — a proud advocate of how education bred success. He was constantly the butt of the viciously insulting jokes among his classmates, all of them wealthier than he, some exceedingly so. The heartless and the obnoxious were the only sides he ever saw of the financially blessed. Martin had been taught to forgive, but as he got older, that side of him — the side that CONSTRICTION

29

yearned for bitter, blatant retribution — grew as well. It filled him, consumed him, controlled him like a puppet. And Martin liked it, to the point where he allowed himself to depend on that feeling. He moved to New York City the day after he graduated from high school and set about seeking out the rich and planning the first of what were to be many successful thefts. What he stole and didn’t particularly like, he sold to the highest bidder among the characters that dwelled in the city’s large underbelly. He kept what he loved. Sometimes, Martin thought of it as a game, one in which he always won. Stealing was not only his life work. It was his life.

For weeks, Martin had been following a young Chinese woman named Xiang Su who had moved a few weeks earlier to New York so she could run that sector of her parents’ international business. From what Martin could see, she was extremely and unnaturally spoiled. Every morning, he watched her get out of her limousine and head off to work donning the finest clothes and jewellery, flanked by two bodyguards. Martin imagined the many ways he could have his fun at her expense.

Xiang Su’s Manhattan mansion was filled with various artefacts flown in from all over the world. Within the first three weeks since she arrival in New York, Martin could see movers on the street wheeling in crates while Xiang Su yelled and pointed. Due to the value of her property, her home was under constant guard. To Martin, this just made the game more interesting. He still managed to pinch a few things over the course of a week. His dingy apartment was stocked with intricate hand-carved knives, smooth clay kylikes, and beautiful Navajo rugs.

Xiang Su was stupefied. Martin loved to see her upset about the stolen objects, stomping around her home screaming at her guards in Mandarin.

Because none of his victims had ever seen Martin, he often spent time around the houses from which he stole without fear. That day, however, was different. In the afternoon, he noticed men lifting a giant wooden box up the stone steps and through Xiang Su’s front doors.

Martin smiled to himself — there would be something new to steal.

But Xiang Su was also smiling.

It was the first strange thing he noticed. Why would she be smiling? Martin thought again. Perhaps the content of the box was not a priceless artefact but some sort of security system. The smile returned to his face. Unless Xiang Su had cameras — which she didn’t — there would be no way to stop him.

That evening, Martin left his apartment and walked the thirty blocks to Xiang Su’s mansion. He didn’t take a taxi because he didn’t want anyone to tail him. He dressed in jeans and a light T-shirt. He carried with him a gym bag with tools and cloth to wrap the items in.

He crossed East 80th Street and stared up at Xiang Su’s mansion. It was four stories high and made of sandstone, with tall black windowpanes. Martin walked around to the side and opened the back gate. He tiptoed up the deck and peered through the first-floor window. The second strange thing he noticed was that there were no guards patrolling the hallways. Xiang Su’s house was a goldmine and tonight there was no one to protect it. Surprised at his luck, he slid the window

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open and crawled in. The third strange thing Martin noticed was the house’s temperature. Despite the stagnant summer air, the house was unusually hot.

Martin hadn’t taken two steps before he felt sweat trickling down the back of his neck.

He ascended the stairs to the third floor and turned the corner to Xiang Su’s steamy walk-in closet, which was separate from her bedroom. There were still no guards. In fact, it seemed as if the house was completely empty. The silence made him nervous, but still he pressed on. Martin made his way through the aisles of designer clothes and shoes and found the woman’s custom-made red jewellery box.

Putting his flashlight between his teeth, Martin opened the box. As soon as he did, he heard a slight beeping sound, and a white cloud streamed out from the box and into Martin’s face. It made his skin tingly, but it had no scent. He panicked. Maybe the new shipment was some sort of burglar alarm system! Martin froze, listening for a siren, but heard nothing. Not trusting the silence anymore, he grabbed the first thing he saw — a diamond choker — and left the closet.

After spending a few seconds to calm his racing heart, Martin tiptoed down the landing, clutching the unexpectedly light necklace in his hand. When he was halfway down the stairs, he heard a soft hissing sound. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from, so he assumed it was the vents that caused the place to be so sweltering. He wiped his forehead, still shaken, and was about to leave when something caught his eye. On a pedestal in the far corner of the room was a small mirror. It was an ornate masterpiece: frame made of gilded jacaranda wood and studded with ivory and pearls. It was the most beautiful thing Martin had seen.

Maybe this was what Xiang Su had ordered that day.

He walked up to it, eyes shining, and stared into its smooth glass surface.

But his face was not the only one he saw.

Behind him, dangling from a ceiling crossbeam was a long white and black snake.

Martin screamed, grabbed the mirror and stepped to the side seconds before the snake snapped forward. He fumbled with his flashlight and heard the hissing sound again, coming from behind him. He swung his flashlight along the floor. A long brown snake was slithering along the mat towards his feet, gaining speed. Martin ran, shining his flashlight along every surface. There were snakes everywhere: along the backs of couches, wrapped around railings, chair legs, and chandeliers, and gliding along the floor. They lashed out at his legs, his arms, and his face. Someone had clearly let them out, and it was as if they were attracted to his scent. How is this happening? Martin thought. But he couldn’t focus enough to find the answer. The situation filled his mind with stark and egregious fear.

As he tripped over kraits, mambas and bushmasters, he pulled open a closet door and stepped inside. The space was cramped; Martin took a moment to catch his breath. He checked his watch. It was a little after two in the morning. He’d have to escape soon or he’d be stuck. His heart pounded in his chest. He still had the necklace and the mirror, and the money he’d get from the latter would surely sustain him for weeks. The optimism reassured him, but not for long — suddenly, he felt something slither across his feet. His heart crawled into his throat. He CONSTRICTION

31

reached for the doorknob when he heard the lock click from the outside. Someone had shut him in.

“No!” Martin yelled.

He banged his fists against the door. He screamed and cursed. Even so, he felt a cold mass climbing steadily up his body, squeezing slowly. He tried to move, but the massive python only pressed tighter against him. After about ten minutes or so, he stopped struggling. It finally dawned on him what exactly had happened that night. Martin couldn’t fight any longer. He knew exactly what was happening.

The life was being squeezed out of him, and there was nothing he could do about it. He gasped for air in the dark closet. Black spots danced before his eyes, and his bones creaked and shattered against the weight. Blood filled his trachea and pooled around his tongue.

No one would find him here — he knew that.

As he took his last breath, he heard Xiang Su’s laughter from the other side of the door.

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WRITER’S BLOCK Chris Gilmore

You want to write, but you have nothing to say. It’s been proven. By family and friends and exes. You’re too Canadian to complain. Too young, too spoiled, too boring. You haven’t lived. You haven’t lost. You haven’t suffered. Your only complaint is that you have no complaints.

So you write about writing. About trying to write. You try to write about trying to write. And you fail.

First, you try on a few styles, hoping to find one that fits: E. Hemingway It had started to rain. He sat at his desk and stared at the blank page in front of him. He had been thinking about the style he would use for his story and about his favourite writers and their styles. He got up and grabbed a bottle of beer from the fridge and poured the beer in a glass that was sitting on the shelf. He drank the beer. Then he put down the glass and walked back to his desk and sat in his chair. He wrote a fine and true first sentence.

C. Dickens It was the best of sentences; it was the worst of sentences...

WRITER’S BLOCK

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W. Shakespeare Shall I compare thee to a starting line?

Thou art more clumsy and more [three-syllable adjective] L. Tolstoy All good first sentences are alike; each bad first sentence is bad in its own way.

W. Faulkner Because if it was just a bad story with no start and no end on this stormy night with the clouds and wind raging and my heart beating like mad because if I could just get started and it could just be the two of us me and the first sentence in some hell somewhere where it would just be us and I could do something dreadful I would say Father I have committed plagiarism it was I it was not my first sentence it was Faulkner’s.

T.S. Eliot Writing is the cruellest art, breeding Tired narratives out of old experiences, mixing Metaphors and similes, stirring Readers’ expectations with dull plots.

Speaking of plots, you think of a good one. Predictable, but reliable.

You start a vomit draft. No names, no settings. Just outlines. Arcs. Shapes.

J. woke up and [insert activity] Usually, he would [insert routine, background information] [This new activity] allowed him to [insert positive internal developments resulting from external developments] and J. felt that everything would be [insert optimistic platitudes, foreshadowing symbolic significance of new activity] J. wondered what [Love Interest 1] would think of [this new activity] considering [insert Conflict 1: unrequited love] J. concluded that [Love Interest 1] would be unimpressed, as always, but [insert Conflict 2: inability to accept rejection] J.’s family and friends felt [insert Conflict 3: disapproval of Love Interest 1] and begged J. to pursue other women.

You stop to refill your glass. And stretch. And brainstorm the end of Act One.

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What does J. want? you ask yourself, as if expecting to know the answer.

J. wants what everyone wants. A good story, well-told. In which he is the central character.

What do you want? you ask the page, as if expecting to read the answer.

The page replies, I want what you want.

And what I want, you tell yourself, is poetry. Life-altering, life-affirming poetry.

On the page and on the stage. In mind. In body. In action.

Poem 1: “Aesthetics” Art for its own sake is never always never out-of-date.

(At least, not at this rate.)

Poem 2: “A Poem Whose Title is Longer Than the Poem” Is not worth reading.

Or writing.

And (starting now) the title is misleading.

The lies deepen with every word.

Every syl la ble.

Every l e t t e r.

Every .

Nothing is working. Even the page can tell. You need to write something real. Something personal. Start small and expand. Forget plot. Forget story. Start with a sentence. An idea. Hell, start with a verb. All you need is a word. And a girl. In that order.

Poem 3: “Writer’s Block” [leave space blank]

WRITER’S BLOCK

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THE THREE LIL’ PIGS Sarita Sanchez

Yo, lemme tell you this cray-cray story about my amigos, the three lil’ pigs. The first one built his crib out of straw. No diggity, this was a doo doo wack idea. The second pig built his crib out of sticks. It was just as rinky-dink. The third pig built his crib out of bricks. Now, his crib wasn’t a disgrace like his brothers’. It ain’t got none of this straw and stick business happenin’. It was tight! The perfect place for his crew to be chillin’ at.

One day a wolf was walkin’ through their hood, showin’ off some of his new bling and fly style, when he saw the straw crib and stopped. He hollered, “Yo homey, can you help your homeboy out?”

The first pig came out and replied, “Wassup G? Fly kicks you got there.

Where’d you get ‘em?”

“My home slice hooked me up. Can I borrow your CDs?” “For what?”

“My party on Saturday. It’s gonna be off the shizzle.”

“Can I chill there?”

“No.” “Why not?”

“Cause you a wangster.”

“Why you trippin’?”

“I ain’t trippin’. The only one who’s trippin’ around here is you! I just came to borrow your CDs.”

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“If I ain’t comin’, you can’t have my music!”

“FINE!” shouted the wolf. He got so mad that he karate chopped the crib down. “Hyaaaaa!” Then he jacked the CDs and ran.

The next crib he saw was pure ugly on the outside, but the inside wasn’t all that bad. The second pig was outside chillin’ when the wolf came and hollered at him. “Wassup dawg?”

“Not much,” replied the pig.

“It’s blazin’ hot out, man! I’m workin’ up a sweat. Can you get me some water?”

“I’m down with that,” said the pig.

When the pig came back with the water the wolf gulped it down at once.

“Can you hook me up with a fan too?”

“No way, man! I need it,” yelled the pig, gettin’ more and more vexed by the minute.

“But it’s steamin’ out!”

“Word, but no.”

The wolf took out his lighter and lit the crib on fire. It now looked like a giant campfire with a roasting pig.

“Mmmm… Bacon!” said the wolf, lookin’ at the lifeless pig. He wolfed down the pig and continued down the road. “Awesome! I got a free lunch.”

When he arrived at the brick crib, he hollered, “Yo, brotha’ from anotha’ motha’!”

The third pig came out wearin’ the flyest outfit ever.

“You look dope, man! That’s some fly bling you got there,” commented the wolf.

“Wassup, G?” asked the pig.

“Not much. You’re hip now.”

“Why you up in my crib?”

“I need you to hook me up with some speakers.”

“Sure thing, man,” said the pig. He went down to the basement and not long after, the pig came out with a pair of big fancy speakers.

“Those are dope! You’re hype,” exclaimed the wolf.

“You throwin’ a party or what?”

“Yeah, it’s gonna be off the chain. You wanna come?”

“I’m down with that.”

“It’s this Saturday,” said the wolf. “Later.”

On the day of the party the pig arrived just in time. But he didn’t got no partyin’ on his mind. He was ragin’. The pig ran up to the wolf and smacked him hard.

“OWW! WHAT’D YOU DO THAT FOR?” shouted the wolf in mad pain.

“DON’T PRETEND YOU DON’T KNOW! I KNOW HOW YOU DESTROYED BOTH OF MY BROS’ CRIBS AND HOW YOU KILLED ONE OF THE THREE LIL’ PIGS

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THEM!” “It’s not my fault they were trippin’. They got what they deserved.”

By now a crowd had formed around them, shoutin’, “Fight, fight, fight!”

The two of them were so busy fightin’, that none of them heard the sirens in the background. They both looked scratched and bruised, but it seemed like no one was gonna step off.

“Hands up!” The fight ended at the sound of those two words. “You guys are busted,” scolded the po-po as he smacked their wrists with cuffs.

In the po-po’s car, no one was talkin’. “Thanks a lot chicken head,” whispered the wolf to the pig.

The car stopped. “Out,” ordered the po-po. He led them inside and down the hall into the ugliest cell ever. “Both of you got 5 months for now, but it’ll build up once we lay charges.”

As you may have noticed no names were used in this story. That’s cuz they’re still investigatin’ this tragic case.

Cray-cray, ain’t it?

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CONTRIBUTORS

Melissa Cederqvist Melissa is a Toronto-born student of history and economics at Victoria College in the University of Toronto. She began writing poems around the first grade and soon developed the habit of coming up with stories to embellish the everyday experience of life. At the moment she enjoys practicing her writing in the rests between classes or the one-minute pauses between subway stops.

Jerico Espinas Jerico Espinas is a third-year student at U of T’s St. George campus. He currently has a double major in Bioethics and Health Care Ethics with a minor in Writing and Rhetoric. Jerico is an active writer on campus and has experience contributing to student newspapers, model UN clubs, and magazines. After writing so much non-fiction, he is glad he is still able to write creatively. “Wasabi” was originally a year-end project for Innis College’s Seminar in Creative Writing. He thanks Professor English and his fellow U of T students for their help in editing the story.

CONTRIBUTORS

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Chris Gilmore Chris Gilmore is currently pursuing a Master’s in English and Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. He writes fiction, plays and screenplays.

Carly Haspel Terese Mason Pierre Terese Mason Pierre was born and raised in Mississauga, Ontario, yet has attended over ten schools in three different countries. In the past, she has published an electronic novel, a short story and a poem, the latter in two different magazines.

Her interests include epistemology, medical anomalies, and approaching world issues through logic. While writing is her passion, she is an excellent planner and plans to study medicine after completing a double major in Bioethics and Healthcare Ethics. She currently lives in Downsview, Ontario, with her charismatic brother, her worldly mother, and her manipulative cat, Benjamin.

Anne Rucchetto Anne is a writer working and living in Toronto’s west end. She has been previously published in Acta Victoriana, The Trinity Review, ditch, Shorthand, and Poetry Pacific. She has other non-fiction work published through Camberely Press.

Sarita Sanchez Sarita Sanchez has a passion for writing. She won first place in the Bernard Chernos Essay Competition in 2012, third place in the Abandoned Amusement Park Contest for the University of Toronto Creative Writing Group in 2013, and third place in the film treatment competition for Raindance on Campus in 2014.

Besides writing she also enjoys photography, design, art, film, and learning different languages. She speaks English, Spanish, French and Italian. Sarita is a second year university student majoring in Cinema Studies and minoring in Spanish and French.

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WITH STORIES BY

Melissa Cederqvist Jerico Espinas Chris Gilmore

Terese Mason Pierre

Volume 3

Carly Haspel

Anne Rucchetto Sarita Sanchez AN ANNUAL REVIEW OF SHORT FICTION

Volume 3 路 Spring 2014 2014