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 […]
Literary
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Half-heard, chapter 19
“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 […]
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Hello, Sweetheart by Elaine McCluskey
The 21 stories in Dartmouthian Elaine McCluskey’s fourth book of fiction are portraits of life in Nova Scotia, but you won’t find misty tales of lighthouses here. Instead, these stories take us inside a sex boutique, the Sears Portrait Studio, VLT rooms and a cat show, effectively balancing the dark with the absurd. McCluskey is […]
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Half-heard, chapter 18
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, […]
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KEPMITE’TMNEJ (HONOUR SONG)
on the coldest day of winter at the clearing, where Long Pond froze over seashell in one hand, a fist-full of cedar and sage in the other, you pierce the snow bank with a seabird’s feather you light sage smudge under boot soles over your pants onto winter jacket and across your chest down one […]
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MS. JONES
I used to stand in front of my dad while he was weeding the lawn so that I could block his butt crack from showing. He wore purple mini-shorts those summers, and his butt would pour over the top when he’d squat down low to pull dandelions out by their roots from the grass. I […]
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Half-heard, chapter 17
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 […]
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TOP 15 BOOKS OF 2014
picks by Lindsay Raining Bird All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (Knopf) This Giller Prize nominated novel from heavy hitter Miriam Toews is about Elfrieda—a talented concert pianist who desperately wants to die—and her younger sister Yolandi who can’t stop trying to convince her to live. Spanning their childhood and Elf’s most recent suicide […]
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Half-heard, chapter 16
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 […]
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The Blue Tattoo
Local writer Steven Laffoley’s seventh book, and first novel, focuses on the days leading up to the disaster and gruesome events that followed the Halifax Explosion. The bulk of the book focuses on the damages caused by the explosion, including an unnecessarily lengthy 80-plus-page section describing the bloodshed and destruction in gory detail. Most of […]
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Half-heard, chapter 15
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 […]
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Half-heard, chapter 14
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 […]