You sit across from me on the couch, a variety of lamps yellowing the dark room, your fingernails tapping against your knee. The silence is filled with my heartbeat pressing against my neck, my wrists, my fingers. The blood gets caught in my muscles. You...
[audio mp3="https://www.queensquilt.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Host.mp3"][/audio] The dread comes first. The signs begin later, though still months in advance. You’ve seen it happen before. You know what to expect, what to fear. The way your sister’s body changed and betrayed her. The way your best friend survived, only to wish...
Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, violence, homophobia, self-harm, ableism ________________________________ There is no funeral for the boy who drowned in the lake. He was only sixteen, a year older than me. A life ahead of him, until there wasn’t. Until someone saw him kissing Tommy Gilner from down the...
24th March Dear Charlie, I miss you. I know you’ve been busy, but your last letter was two months ago, and I’m going crazy. I can’t stand being without you. The longer I’m stuck here, the more I want to tear across the page and scrape ink into...
[audio mp3="http://www.queensquilt.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/i-will-raise-my-Babygirl.mp3"][/audio] As a child, I would cling to her arm. Both my hands wound tightly around her muscle; skin that sunk and sagged from gravity fifteen years too early. My dad looks at photos of her from their twenties and tells me, “This is how...
[audio mp3="http://www.queensquilt.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/redamancy.mp3"][/audio] They marry on a Sunday evening, with no witnesses but the birds in the trees and the stars in the sky. The valley is quiet. A soft summer breeze ruffles the leaves of the willow tree the pair has found shelter under, the brook murmurs...
[audio mp3="http://www.queensquilt.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/year-of-the-rat.mp3"][/audio] They burrow too deep within the earth to know nothing, says the rat man. He wears on him the appearance of the witch Rasputin, and it is witchcraft indeed that he performs. The rats had for a time forced me to divert from my...
He never walks by. He could always walk by. I don’t forget that. Behind the curtains, my mind runs his voice through my brain. This street is empty, and I am pale behind my curtains. He never walks by, but he’ll never see what’s in the...
It was the first Winter with you. We bought a Christmas tree, a real one, the type that my mother would never let me have as a child. Once we had lugged it from the store and positioned it in the corner of the dining...
After they fish the waterlogged corpse from its resting place at the bottom of the lake, they arrange it on a table like a funerary slab. They detach the metal hooks from the dredging net and unwrap the layers of net away from the cold...