Many summers ago, there was a lake in Mattie’s backyard. Now a bowl of cracked earth dips from the parched rim. The blank expanse presses on for miles, summer homes abandoned along the shore.

The hulk of an old data processing plant looms above all.

Mattie barely remembers when she used to fish with her grandfather. She was so young, hooking bass and pike, catfish schooling in black clouds beneath their dock.

Once, they sold their catch to visitors. Now only scaleless skeletons bleach white on exposed silt.

Mattie and her grandfather search for once drowned treasures. Sunken sailboats. Old ou...

Ten-Point Buck

Kaye dreams of killing his father. When I am not terrified of this dream, I am so jealous that I wish I could steal it through his lips. I don’t know what I’d do if I ever saw my father again. Kaye’s certainty calms me, violent as it is. Now, as Kaye stares down the sight of his rifle and the tremendous buck we’ve been tracking for three days comes up from the brush, he is closer than ever to achieving it. In the Sierra Nevada, mosquito-bitten and muddy, I am not jealous. My tongue tastes of pennies, and more than anything, I am sorry. I want to take Kaye in my hands, run his c...

We were boys when we met by the seashore. He threw a stick at me and called me ugly. I tackled him into the sand. We became inseparable.

His name was Angelo. For fourteen days, Angelo and I met as if by preordination at dawn, on the beach behind my family’s vacation rental on the southern Maine coast. The tide in the bay went out, out, out, and so did we, scouting across the massive expanse of wet, freshly revealed earth, hunting in the tide pools that formed between the rocks, seeking out belligerent crabs and docile sea stars, collecting stones and shells and sea glass. Decades ago, a hotel...

Edwin was an enthusiastic lover, eager to please and to pleasure. He kissed Briar all over, even the strange red bumps she’d first noticed on her skin that morning. His mouth was slow, then teasing, and he brought her to her peak—once, twice—as they made love.

After, they fell back on the mattress in a sweaty, sticky-sweet tangle. “You taste like honeysuckle,” he whispered in her ear before dozing off.

Those would be her husband’s last words.

Briar roused in the morning to find Edwin staring past her head, pupils blown wide yet unseeing. Unmoving. Unbreathing. She clasped his clammy shoulder ...

They’re monsters, the combines and threshers inching along the highway—I’m almost to Saskatoon when they surround me. I drop my speed from 110 to 15 km/hr, and my GPS recalibrates to say I’m an hour and fifteen minutes from downtown.

I look for the end of the vehicles but there’s only smoke and metal. My pulse picks up. Remember to breathe. I make this mistake every year, driving into the city when the ag-show is ending. I want to smash my head against the glass, but that won’t get me to my hotel faster.

I check in ninety minutes later. My phone buzzes, and it’s my partner, wanting to know if...

This is a trick our uncle teaches us before he leaves. When the rumbling from the mountains makes our homes shake and we are scared or anxious, he calms us by forcing us to focus on our immediate environment. “Look for colours,” he says. “Something red, something brown, something yellow. Listen, really listen, to the space around you. This is your home and you are safe here.”

Our uncle teaches us many things as kids, my sister and me. We learn how to make a fire, which plants are edible and which can heal a wound. He takes us just past the edge of the woods outside of town, farther from home ...

The Monster pedals into the village on a bright yellow bicycle, red tassels streaming from the handlebars, stabilizers clattering on the cobbles as it rings its bell—tring-a-ling, tring-a-ling—past the first of the well-kept houses.

Mrs Griffiths, scourge of aphids, rain-goddess to hydrangeas, spots it as it passes her gate, arrests it with a "Hello there, young man. Where have you come from?"

To which the Monster, face aglow, angelic in the sun, replies in a voice like a cherub that it is not allowed to talk to strangers; apologies if that appears rude.

"Not at all, young man," Mrs Griffiths...

“Next week,” says Amanda, “I’m going to become a mosquito.”

I twist myself between the swing seat’s chains and stare up into the muggy sky of mid-July. There were so many other things I’d rather shift into, personally. An albatross, maybe. We’d reached Coleridge in our English prep course, and the bird’s wings glowed white and huge in the textbook’s illustration, so much more ferocious than the frightened men on the decks below.

“I’m going to fly through Jason’s bedroom window and bite him so hard he’ll go crazy itching and won’t study for the algebra test. Then, I’ll get a top grade and win...

Sophie Barbeau had taken just four steps through the front door of her childhood home when her mother noticed the bruises.

“What’s this?”

Her mother licked the pad of her thumb and scrubbed at Sophie’s cheek, the way she’d scrubbed at dirt and crumbs and smears of melted popsicle when Sophie was little. A deep purple bruise bloomed on her cheekbone as a coat of makeup rubbed away.

Sophie pushed her mother’s hand aside. “Ow, Maman. It’s nothing. Just a bruise.”

“I can see that. How did you get it?”

Maman reached for Sophie’s face again, but Sophie was faster.

“I don’t know, I just woke up wit...

The pieces did not trickle down at the start—they fell in sheets that peeled off like expired wallpaper, leaving a starless abyss gaping wide overhead.

It’s been months now. The deluge has slowed some: a chip here, a sliver there, carving a dark and crooked chunk from the otherwise perfect summer sky. But it’s always at its worst where I’m currently biding my time, on a gritty towel in the shadow of some oversized driftwood—she loved the beach more than anywhere else. Someone too much like her runs past, and my heart clenches. On cue, bits of the sun and clouds and high blue sky plummet into...