When

by Scott Solomon 

When your spouse isn’t disappointed when a babysitter fails to show up.

When your spouse gives the name of a dependable babysitter to someone else.

When your spouse refuses to block the kids from hosting weekend sleepovers, thereby blocking the privacy required for sexual intercourse.  Continue reading

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My Brother’s Pituitary Macroadenoma Speaks

by Donald Pasmore

I don’t want to hurt you but I have needs—I will take
your eye at the optic nerve and your adulthood has been  Continue reading

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If the Sun Has Legs

by Deborah Blenkhorn

“And whether pigs have wings.”
–Lewis Carroll, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”

“It does so—the sun does so have legs!”

“Does not!”

“Does too!”

This was the subject of debate between cousin Callie and me, ages two-and-a-half and three-and-a-half respectively.  My father and I spent a season with his sister Lila, her husband Mal, and their daughter on Prince Edward Island in the wake of my parents’ break-up back in Ontario.  My father had grown up in the Maritimes (as indeed had my mother—they had been high school sweethearts in the small university-town of Sackville, New Brunswick), so perhaps this was a homecoming of sorts for him, though hardly a joyful one.  I had spent each summer (and would continue to do so until way into my teens) with my grandparents on the New Brunswick side of the Northumberland Strait, so the Maritimes represented stability and comfort to me, too.  Continue reading

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Mundanity of Evil

by Kathryn Jordan

It was a holocaust play based on photos.
We saw the photos on the huge backdrop.
Bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, secretaries. Continue reading

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Everest

by Mark Brazaitis

It’s midnight at Camp Four. Our guide is leaving for the summit. The woman he impregnated—my wife—is too weak to go on. Her water broke thirty minutes ago. Our guide hoped she would be the first person to give birth at the peak of the world’s tallest mountain.

“You’re leaving us?” I shout at him as he heads off toward the Balcony. “You aren’t going to help with the birth?”

He turns to me. “I’m a guide, not a doctor.”

“You would’ve been happy to help if she was giving birth on the summit.”  Continue reading

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