Sublime

I brought her, cradled in my arms, the three waffle irons I’d uncovered on the kitchen counter. “Three,” I told her, as though they were a litter. “Yes,” said my mother. “Which one do you want to keep?” “All of them.” I don’t think my mother formally collected waffle irons (though later I would find an antique one beneath her bed), and at the momen

Her father once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.

The usual feeling of having my fortune told came over me, as it did whenever I approached accommodation for the first time. Good, I was blessed; bad, cursed. A short list of my minor obsessions: hotel rooms, fortune-tellers, coin-op machines. Embarrassing, how much I refer to fortune-telling in my life—by life, I mean writing. Not memoir: I am not

The sea was always heaving things up and hurling them back: fishing lines, floats, beer cans, plastic toys, tampons, Nike sneakers. A few years earlier it was severed feet. People were finding them up and down Vancouver Island, washed up on the sand. One had been found on this very beach.

His belly is tight under his soft skin, glabrous, like stone wrapped in chamois leather.