Fall 2025, Volume 46, No. 3

$14.95

Cover Image is “Intoxication to Prove” by Siva K Hanson

Fiction
Jennifer Deleskie
Heather Dewar
Hilary Fair
Chris Pickrell
Eleni Zaptses

Poetry
Lindsey Childs
Zoe Dickinson
Sanita Fejzić
Susan Gillis
Evenlyn Lau

Creative Non-Fiction
Taidgh Lynch
Sue Nador
Aaron Rabinowitz
Cora Siré

Non-Fiction Preview

My Father’s First Affair
By Sue Nador

Rummaging through old family photos, I came across several my father had taken at a New Year’s Eve party in the 1970s. The party was at the home of a woman I’ll call Bonnie.

I can’t remember how my parents met Bonnie and her family. We lived in different neighbourhoods. But our families had so much in common that it made sense that we would become friends. Bonnie had children my age and we got along; I had a crush on one of her sons. My father and Bonnie’s husband were both athletic: they skied together in the winter and played tennis together in the summer. Even as a child I appreciated Bonnie’s husband’s charm and good looks. I often showed off my limited gymnastics moves. I could do the splits three-ways back then. He always pretended to be impressed.

Bonnie and her husband came to my parents’ parties. We had a good basement for entertaining. There was a large common area with a pool table and a well-stocked bar. No one thought about drinking and driving back then. One time, a guest asked me how my father took his gin and tonic. “Half and half,” I said, thinking I had heard that somewhere. My father had quite a laugh over that.

My parents loved to dance and turned our guest bedroom at the back of the basement into a discotheque with coloured lights. They had a small collection of vinyl albums. One was the soundtrack from Hair, the Broadway musical; I loved the groovy cover with the mirror images of a Black man sporting green and red afros. I can picture my parents dancing together, but I think I may have made that up.

I loved the party food: pigs in a blanket and cheese sticks sprinkled with caraway seeds that came out of our oven piping hot. I enjoyed the attention of my parents’ friends until it was time for bed. The sound of music and laughter wafted up from the basement as I fell asleep. **Check out the issue for the full story!**

Poetry Preview

A Visit
By Susan Gillis

It’s a roast meat kind of day.
A whiskey around the fire day.
A peas and butter, celery and olives
in bevelled glass dishes day, the air

so brittle a wing beat could slice it.
My father appears on snowshoes
over the crest of the back field.
He’s been away. Hunting, it seems.

All my life, and I never knew he was
a hunter. Why didn’t you tell us, Dad.
Well, never mind. Tell me instead
what you found. I found the place

where lowbush blueberries grow
so thick one good kick can knock free
enough for six pies. I found the cove
with granite boulders big as tables 

the whole family could sit around
and pluck crabs from the pools
beside them. A few sticks, a cauldron
of water…And I found the shelter

 I used to set sail from back when
having a body was a joy, hiking out
to heel the boat the most natural thing.
Hands like chestnut leaves, uncreased

knuckles like springs. Outside it looks
like the house I grew up in. Inside,
the house I raised you in. The hill
I crossed to get here, though?

I don’t think I’ve been there before.
I hand him a tumbler. His hand
is cold, even through our mittens.
We stand close to the fire and stare

across the hill. If there were tracks
where he walked, they’ve filled in
though there isn’t a flake of snow
in the air, and only the gentlest wind.

Fiction Preview

Arrivals
By Eleni Zaptses

When the oxygen masks drop on our final descent, I realize I’ve made a grave mistake immigrating to Canada. It’s July 30, 1974, four months before I was scheduled to leave Greece. The junta dictatorship was toppling, and there were whispers that a Turkish invasion was imminent. Again.

It wasn’t the first time an army encroached on our shores. Planted their flag and shepherded us into the dense, sprawling mountains while they returned to the valley to occupy our homes. My parents survived two wars already. Lost their first son, a brother, and both their mothers. When my uncle offered to sponsor my immigration to Canada, my mother’s stone face softened to wet clay. She ran her burn-scarred hand over my forehead and shaggy hair and agreed that this was an offer I couldn’t pass up.

I thought I would have four more months to make arrangements and say goodbyes. Pick the yellow-tinted tobacco leaves with my cousins under the searing August sun. Snap the ears of corn off their stalks during the fall harvest and hide a stash under my bed. Lift the third division soccer league trophy for the first time. Until a defunct civil war relic mobilized. The blaring siren sounded like a wheezing cow giving birth.
Hours later, the siren song ended, its echo ringing in our ears. The airspace was shut down and my immigration plans were thrown in jeopardy. My family spent the following days gathered around the kitchen table, taking turns rotating the dial on our radio from one contraband station to another.

Ten days later, my father pulled me from school for the first and only time to take me to the travel agent. The airspace had reopened and we had a chance to move up my ticket for the next available flight. My mother packed my suitcase and tucked dried oregano, Greek coffee and cigarettes between my folded clothes that night. They were gifts for my uncle who was picking me up from the airport.

As the silver taxi drove away from my village’s welcome sign, the balding yellow soccer field was a cemetery. My cousins, who I weaved my patchy leather soccer ball around like pylons, had already moved to the military base for training. My older brother was soon to follow.

“It’s bad luck to look back,” my older brother said from the front seat of the taxi. He was fourteen years older than me, and most people mistook him to be my father. Our father, whose white hair and porous nose gave the impression that he was getting closer and closer to cementing into limestone, was often mistaken as my grandfather. My brother wasn’t offended by the assumption. Instead, he used it as a justification to coerce me into his harebrained schemes.

“I thought that only applied to funerals.”

“Every day has been a funeral.”

**Check out the issue for the full story!**