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Half-heard, Chapter 30

Friday afternoon. Myles’ shadow descended over a mountain of combusted garbage bags hurled carelessly over the uneven tufts of dried, blonde grass outside his and Welnot’s house. In typical pre-party cleanup fashion, the Northwood roommates put everything that couldn’t fit under couches or in closets into garbage bags and tossed it out the door.  Sarah […]

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Half-heard, Chapter 29

The same nuclear sundown projected itself against the bell-clear sky outside Myles’ bedroom window while long-necked Myles laid in his room, stared up at the full-length mirror above his bed polishing his small-talk and adjusting the parameters of his hand gestures with a needle-point precision. Motions cranked with an awkward rigidity like shoddy ratchets in the […]

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Review: When The Saints

Sarah Mian’s debut novel, When the Saints, is a sly and funny book about a scrappy family living through some trying times. Tabby Saint is the tough and admirably resourceful protagonist who returns to her home of Solace River, Nova Scotia, after being more or less abandoned years earlier as a child. She returns to […]

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Half-heard, chapter 28

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 […]

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Variety is the spice of writing

Friday the 13th just got lucky for Halifax’s literati. Irish-Canadian writer, Emma Donoghue, author of Slammerkin, The Sealed Letter and most famously, Room, is in town to take part in Saint Mary’s annual Cyril Byrne Lecture. Donoghue, who has been publishing books since the 1990s, became a household name in 2010 when Room was released […]

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Write For Your Life, that’s an order

There will be blood. Well, maybe not blood, but as far as fundraisers go, Write For Your Life! offers some pretty heated competition. The event raises money for The Doppler Effect Production Society, a not-for-profit theatre company that has produced nine original works—including the Coast readers’ favourite play of 2014, Tribe of One—since it was […]

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Half-heard, chapter 26

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 […]

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Half-heard, chapter 25

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 […]

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Half-heard, chapter 24

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 […]

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Half-heard, chapter 23

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 […]

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Half-heard, chapter 22

“It’s kind of a weird story.” “I got time,” Myles said, awkwardly. He caught himself remembering a detective from a Dick Tracy-type movie saying the same thing to a distressed client at a bar and felt a little embarrassed.   Myles waited for her to share. Quiet between people scared Myles. As it—the quiet—lengthens it becomes […]

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Half-heard, chapter 21

Myles and Northwood’s stoops were probably 10 feet apart at the most, and though the stoops were about to function as spots for incidental social encounters in citified environments, just the sheer notion of Myles making small-talk with Sarah—this paragon of coolness who just now came outside and sat down with a pack of smokes—terrified […]

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