Ryan Allen

Tuesday morning. Sticky, airless heat. The too-dirty house was still recovering from Welnot’s moratorium on the bathrooms. In the air was the damp smell of a vacant cottage and beach towels. Narrow beams of yellow-white morning light shining through greased, dusted and palmed living room windows onto Gertraud and Sarah’s post-adventure pizza box from the […]

“She what?” Will screams. Alex, now shaving but still in the tub, a practice he picked up as a kid when he wanted to take as long as he could in the bathroom to annoy his four older siblings. He’d shave when sitting in there pretending to enjoy humming along to songs on the radio […]

SOME YEARS EARLIER: “It’s been theorized that the lonely hearts of our generation find comfort in television,” the social worker said. “They develop relationships with the boys and girls parading and fawning over each other on the television screen.” Little long-necked and anemia-white Myles steered his bite-sized aerial action figure in front of his face, […]

Trevor leaves Alex in the bathroom, feeling good about revealing his unrequited feelings for sweet Leland and as quickly as Trevor and his odour of Will leaves the bathroom, the musk re-enters. This time on Will himself. Alex whines, “You too? What the hell?”  “Sorry. I thought maybe Trevor’s exit signified the bathroom was up […]

Fleeing the basement and running back home for his Wings reruns on channel 051, Myles catches the clamour of a bottle cart behind him and looks back to make sure no one caught him hopping out of the window. He views two careworn and emaciated bottle collectors mowing towards him sharing the cart, and he […]

Now in on Young Street, in the Hydrostone Market area—this quaint strip of shops and restaurants, all architecturally similar with this splendid example of English-style garden suburb sort of vibe to it all—Sarah and Gertraud arrive at the first spot that doesn’t seem crowded. The cart comes to the most awkward and anticlimactic slowing-down-to-a-halt sort of […]

If Myles had not been in the basement listening to the pseudo-sitcom ridiculousness going on upstairs, he might have seen what some of the roommates looked like in the flesh for the first time ever. He would have caught Sarah and Gertraud in a real unanticipated bonding moment, the kind of relationship-strengthening exercise that only […]

The city’s cold air rested itself in the cracks of the city. It filled the negative spaces between walls like a vapourous caulking, filling mailboxes and surging north and south at the Barrington and Spring Garden intersection. The painful, palpable chill that smacked against your face cloaked the downtown down-and-outers that piled on top of […]

Dougie’s party wheeled onward through pinatas, play-fights, balloon animals, duck-duck-goose, apple-bobbing, games of tag, two dozen youngsters unleashing enervated laughter through heaves and heavy coughs while being chased around a home where only Dougie knew all the labyrinthine twists and turns, through parents’ legs underneath the long dining room table. Fro-yo was dispensed and dished […]

ACT II: And for that little guy, that little kid who heard the rest of the pre-meeting from the vents in the dust-laden and dampened basement, he heard A. Welnot sniffling to himself and mumbling maniacally while everyone else was lost during his time there by the bathroom door. He sat down by himself most […]

In the living room they still sat. Their eyes near-watering as the wretched stench of the downstairs bathroom wafted in. The Northwood Terrace roommate meeting was actually more of a precursor to what Welnot’s hoped-for actual meeting would be: a poll to see what day was best for everyone to meet. Welnot was elated and […]