Fairest Folk

by Riley Vainionpaa
Image: Riley Vainionpaa

I needed them to exist. I set the table for the ritual, spread a yellow sheet filched from the hall closet over it and placed an element in each quadrant. Fire was a tea light, plucked from the bag in the cabinet where my moms kept the bone china platter with the painted lilacs and their collection of limited edition Peter Pan plates. I always chose Tinker Bell. Water was the conch shell from that time we went to Mexico and the whole trip all I did was search for aluxes in the gardens outside our hotel, convinced the knee-high tricksters could get me out of the dance contest that night. Air was a feather I’d found at school, probably dropped from one of the Canada geese that liked to shit all over the soccer field. Randy Ayzer said it was dirty and said I was dirty for touching it. I told him everything in Sudbury is dirty, even if you can’t see it, because of the refinery fumes. Earth was a pebble from the driveway. Continue Reading

by Chelsea Margaret Bodnar
Image: Devon Christman and Chelsea Margaret Bodnar

After the flood, white caskets poked out from the ground like strange impacted teeth; your face and hands are real, your thoughts placed in your head meticulous by ancient aliens or ghosts. That must be it; the only way that anything makes sense. This one they gave you only ties you down, makes you recite the dictionary backwards. Good witch insists you’re capable of much more than you know, kills you with kindness, tearstained and stuck at the x’s, your hair held back in vines, an old house with tinted windows. An old window, the panes held back in lead, curved out to the street below. Continue Reading

Lenny the Lemming

by Haran Sivapalan
Image: Haran Sivapalan

“Life will get better”

Lenny the Lemming always hated this phrase. It was a phrase laden with hubris, as if the person who uttered it could confidently predict the trajectory of one’s life. Life could get better, perhaps. But it could also get worse. The trajectory of life was as capricious and unpredictable as that of the best-made North Korean missiles. Continue Reading

Interview with Playwright Meg Braem

by Kaitlin Ruether

Meg Braem is a Canadian playwright hailing from the West Coast who now calls Alberta her home. A champion of her characters and a firm believer in the importance of fore-fronting women’s voices, Meg has been awarded the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama and her play Blood: A Scientific Romance was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama in Canada. She is also a badass beekeeper, parent, and the current Lee Playwright in Residence at the University of Alberta. Continue Reading

Euro-Chick

by MiKA MiLK

She prayed for some light for the photographs that would become his internet presence.

Her skirt caught burdock as she kneeled down in the deep soaked snow to frame a right angle. The sun came out and smiled down on her. Each burr needle entangled in the fabric felt like the one found in some haystack. How many barns must a man walk down..

To what rarity shall one go—when coming from afar, all this way to see you. Continue Reading