Half-heard

The sunset beams in a kind of aqueous way this time of year, hitting the house and slowly dripping down the walls. And the earlier-than-usual glow of late August’s pre-dusk has a kind of sad Technicolor movie hue to it. The living room can look like it’s front row to a dimming sun’s last gasp […]

For whatever reason, unemployment was the norm for the roommates during the academic off-season in Halifax. Perhaps it was the exhaust-rich air that attenuated the constitutions of the student class, turning them to slugs seeking society’s shade, or an entitlement created by creditors and entertainment industry’s subjects with lives full of upper-urban decadence, constantly entrenched […]

The North End Plant Snatcher was by all official reports an unknown maybe-kleptomaniac/maybe-botanophile who ransacked households mid-soiree, right under the tenants’ own noses. If you asked anyone in the social-circles extending between north-north and north-western parts of the city, a guy named Steve was the culprit and irrefutably so, who could be discovered to be […]

Sarah and Myles conversed a while longer. When Sarah felt distressed she was able to keep herself on stable psychological footing by talking it out. If in stasis she’d probably have let herself jump to the furthest conclusions and plot the most damaging feats for reparations. She’d already be at Gert’s door demanding to see what […]

Sarah revealed that she saw three small tied-off latex baggies of who-knows-what fall out of the backside of Gertraud’s pajama shorts, and Myles’ eyes forwardly displaced themselves a comically gruesome distance out of his sockets, so far out in fact that Sarah would later tell friends that she had only seen that kind of eye-pop […]

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 […]