Garden Empire

by Chris Matson

I’d bought the house only the week before, when I was still in possession both of my teeth and of my job as the Head of Machine Learning for an Auckland-based startup. A two-story villa with a section of native bush so dense that it baffled the city noise into a murmur.

After David called to tell me I was being pushed out, I wandered in a daze out of the house and into the cool heart of the garden, where I slumped against a tree fern and watched a bumblebee clamber about a lavender bush. Its bulbous shape evoked the image of a furred twitching brain – my brain, I idly imagined, always seeking nutritious data. But where would it feed if the lavender sickened? Would it throb unhappily to a dark corner of the garden, to dine on sullen fungal growths or the entrails of a dead mouse? My mind’s eye would not hold the bee’s gentle fur in the same scope as a rodent’s cadaver, and the bee flickered into a fat black fly, and the fly multiplied into a swarm. Bees, entrails, flies … Mother had often warned me to be on guard against unhealthy mental progressions, and I realized that without a job I would need something appropriate to occupy my teeming mind.

I needed a hobby. (Continue Reading…)

Them At Number Seventy-Four

by Lindz McLeod

When body number four is discovered, Mrs Patterson thinks that surely now she and her husband will be caught. Days creep past, then a week. 

Two. 

Three.

Their excitement and relief begins to fade. Once again, the desire blossoms, delicate at first, but growing bolder as the hours and days pass. Over a dinner of chips, peas, and gammon steaks, Mrs Patterson ventures a suggestion that perhaps it’s time they do another. Her husband chews for a moment, points out that there’s another James Bond marathon on this weekend they won’t want to miss. She cedes the point. Seeing her disappointment, he suggests he can’t rule out the possibility they might kill again sooner, if someone suitable pops up. Play it by ear, he says. Pass the salt, please. (Continue Reading…)

Laughter Among the Trees

By Suzan Palumbo

The highway to the campground cuts through the granite Laurentian Plateau like a desiccated wound. It’s been twenty five years since I’ve retraced this road and, though the comfort stops along the route have been expanded and stream lined, the forest and rock remain the same; Ancient, silent and unflinching.

I was fourteen when we retreated South West on this stretch to the suburbs of Toronto – me in the back of my parents’ station wagon, the emptiness of Sab’s seat corroding our ability to speak. I couldn’t look through the rear window as we sped away. I didn’t want to acknowledge we were abandoning the search — leaving Sab behind.

 Now, as I pull into a rest stop a hundred kilometres before the park, the nauseating mix of hamburger and exhaust churning my stomach, I know going back for my sister is all I have left. (Continue Reading…)

The Bear Across the Way

by Emily Rigole

I paid no more attention to the bear than I would have any new neighbors. Despite what my husband might tell you, the fact that he was a bear played into my curiosity very little. It was his behavior that concerned me. The same behavior that would have concerned me of any new member to our community. And if people had listened to me a little earlier, instead of tiptoeing about trying not to—God forbid—offend the bear, then maybe all this could have been avoided. (Continue Reading…)