Waving Not Drowning

Joe's hitting the bottom of the bowl. Twenty minutes and the candy is gone. Floor's littered with wrappers, hands sticky with waxy chocolate. Bit of a train wreck. All for naught. Hustling home, desperate to find something resembling a pumpkin to carve, nearly slicing to the bone as the dull paring knife slides off the gourd and into his finger. Joe wonders why he tries so hard. It's expected of him, maybe, he doesn't know. All the hustle and bustle at work, everyone dressing up and gorging on cookies and cake all day like it's the end of the world instead of the end of the month. Head is raging, there's a migraine coming on. Too much crap. Sugar and coffee and cheap sparkling wine. Carly's wedding shower, with a Halloween theme. Terrible idea. The wedding singer meets the walking dead: who'd want that as an omen for upcoming nuptials. The weather's terrible. Unseasonably warm with hurricane force random gales of wind. He checks the candle in the blo...

The neighbours must think she's killing the cat. An intermittent high pitched squeak that opens up to a full throated belch travels through the vents, like a goose in heat or an old man trying to blow his brains out through his nose. This was way easier in seventh grade. It's been 24 years since Reggie picked up a clarinet. She thought for sure she'd be able to run some scales, play a few ditties from memory but she fears she's bursting blood vessels instead. Two thousand dollars in facials, microdermabrasion and intense light therapy for age spots down the drain. The horn was on display in the window of a pawn shop on Queen East and in a flurry of nostalgia she shelled out $150 cash. Perhaps it's a just a crappy horn and would sound like an animal being impaled even if Benny Goodman was blowing it. The real question is what is she doing trying to recapture obsessions of her youth. She hated band practice. Reggie skipped rehearsal as often as she could fake a cold o...

As she walked through the kitchen she took a look at the pile of breakfast dishes in the sink, sighed, doubled back to the circular red mat, rolled up the sleeves on her thumbed yoga jacket and threw on the tap. Do them now or deal with them at the crack of ass in the morning. Why she didn't do them this morning confounds her since she found the time to read 300 pages of her book while searching for knee high brown boots online and cruising recipe blogs for cinnamon twist churro-like donuts. Those are priorities. Dishes, pffft. Unexciting. Until 8 pm rolls by and Kerri realizes how much of the day she's pissed away. Anxiety creeps in like a parachute deflating on top of her, swallowing her whole. Gotta do more, gotta be more. That's when she clocks the teapot, barely warm, filled to the brim with the after dinner herbal digestive tea she boiled off an hour earlier. At least she can drink lukewarm tea. Tepid coffee, not so much. Either ice cold or steaming hot with a thick c...

She's hunting poems. There's a taste in her mouth, sweet and salty with too much heat, words on her tongue, burning, bubbling, sparking, exploding. She loves his words, devours them whole, tearing  pages with her teeth, ripping out spines with her bare hands. Destruction in the consumption. Hers, all hers. Her body littered with the detritus of fonts and fiction pulped paper cardstock and ribbons. She is drooling ink dripping antonyms from the corners of her mouth. A pool of punctuation covers her feet leaking through her toes as she marks a path of poetry with footprints in italics. Her body shakes semi-colons leak from her fingers as she throws her arms overhead shooting exclamation marks into the fading autumnal sky. Ellipses litter the ground where she stands, marking a path to the bench where the tattered broken shells of his writing abound Spent depleted used. That's what words are for, she says. To be used abused articulated manipulated. Word...

Thirteen bottles and six cans at five cents each gives Val ninety five cents. One more and she's got a buck, enough for an apple and three caramels from the penny candy jar. Why it's still called penny candy baffles Val. She even argued the point with Mrs. Han one day saying it was false advertising. Paying ten cents for a piece of candy labeled a penny is highway robbery. Not to mention a cruel tease. But Val shut up when Mrs. Han threatened to ban her from her store. Since its the only depanneur that still sells candy by the piece and carries bananas and green apples, Val backed off. She should check the back garbage can on the football field at recess, see if some of the high school kids or maintenance guys threw away their bottles. They're always drinking those expensive rainbow coloured sport drinks, chugging them back like water. Their stupidity, paying four dollars for something you can get for free from the tap. Grab an apple and a few caramels and voila, energy and...

The appetizers hadn't even arrived yet. They spent twenty minutes poring over the menu, in between long pulls of their gin and tonics, deciding what to order, which plates to share. The waitress made a huge production of returning to their table a third time to see if they had finally come to a decision. Sara was really looking froward to the mango sweet pepper slaw. She didn't anticipate the arrival of Daniel's ex replete with their cranky 3 year old hanging off her hip, the two of them screeching at the top of their lungs. Sara was mortified; Daniel was apoplectic. If he was embarrassed it was hard to tell amidst the name calling and laundry airing in the middle of the restaurant. Sara no longer craved pad thai. This is why she hates being set up. On paper Daniel comes off like a swell guy. Kind, competent, functional. Emotionally available, which for Sara is an accomplishment in and of itself. No more Come Here- Go Away boys. Marcia mentioned he had a son, which Sara ded...

He doesn't want to leave the house. As soon as the sun goes down John wants to dive under the covers and sleep for days. It's in his DNA, he tells himself. Winter's coming, must hibernate. He peels himself off the couch, steps over the cat spread eagled on the throw rug, dodges the stack of magazines he meant to read last week, month, year and finds himself assuming the position: bent over at the waist, peering into the bowels of the fridge, searching for some semblance of edibles among the rows of condiments, rotting thai leftovers and jars of raw nuts. How can people live in Alaska, not seeing the sun for 9 months of the year? John's trying to make an effort. He signed up for a two week introductory trial at the hot yoga studio thinking he might meet some women and get his energy flowing. Or inverted, or something. He's managed to make it to two classes with one more day to go before it expires. It's 8 pm. There's still time to catch a movie, an open mic n...