“Who are you?” Ashley asks the computer screen. There is a man in her photo. He’s wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, a white shirt. “I’ve seen you before.” She flips through the photos, to the day after. The man is in another photo, standing in the doorway of a bookshop. He is wearing […]
Obligatory sex scene
The last time I saw Ayeela with a man, he’d had braces and she’d thought you had to grab the boy’s ass when you were kissing. His name had been Riyad, a little Turkish boy who always wore a sweater, and sat on a green couch by the sidewalk. Ayeela and Riyad had […]
JK
The SUV goes down the road and turns around. It parks on the other side of the street. A man in a turban gets out and starts picking up tennis balls that have flown over the fence from the court. I’m watching videos on my front porch, on the other side of the […]
Best Songs of 2021 (So Far)
Like come on, what’s better than music? More amazing songs out there than I can keep track of, but here are the gems released in 2021 so far, that I’ve come across. I promise not to let you down! These are great. The Right Thing is Hard to Do – Lightning Bug Slow, serene, dreamy. […]
Cavegirl: Redux
I see him every day. He comes to the park and sits on a bench. He eats there and reads. Behind him are trees. When he leaves, I find what he has thrown away. They are wrappers and newspapers. At night, I smell them. […]
The Hum
‘The first time Jeff Topper realized that something odd was happening, he had been trying to return a wallet to a person on Bank Street. He’d run up to the person and handed it back. No response. The person had just kept walking. Jeff had waved his arms and dangled the wallet in front of […]
The Link Between Conspiracy Theories and Racism
Am I Unbalanced? I have dozens of boxes of books in my basement. This week, I put up bookshelves, and went through those boxes, deciding what books I would keep, and what I would discard. I found an old copy of The Sound and the Fury, and remembered how much I loved that strange, unbalanced […]
Mad World: Two Versions
The book or the movie version, the original or the remake. Questions I ask myself, as I wonder which side of those coins I sit on. Am I the book or the movie version? Am I an original or a remake of something? Orzabal Roland, through some strange compulsion, wrote a bouncy, upbeat song in […]
CBC Short Story Prize Longlist News
Hi all, I managed to make the CBC Short Story Prize longlist this year. The 33 longlisted entries out of the 3000 submissions are located here: https://www.cbc.ca/1.5970008. My individual page is here: https://www.cbc.ca/books/literaryprizes/titan-arum-by-trent-lewin-1.5976780 This is my third straight year being longlisted. Feeling awfully humbled and a little overwhelmed. But really happy. If you’d like to […]
On Birthdays
The first child’s name was Mali. Jen had always wanted to go to Africa, but had been afraid of planes, so she’d named her daughter after an African country. Brad had gone along with it. Most truck drivers didn’t care about Africa. “Do you want to make me a popsicle?” asked Brad. “You don’t just […]