Letter From Post Secondary
Dear intellectually cornered friend, it feels like it’s been a long time…
From A to B
I imagine my beginning on the precipice of a fine land. Lines stretching to the horizon and paralleling its expanse. A tartan of social synapse waiting to be walked, talked, navigated. Baby steps do little to discover the distance.
No Cure For Bad Seeds
Back in the fifties, psychologists developed a process called Past Life Regression therapy. Oftentimes, patients will complain of a skin rash, a burning sensation or an emotional or sexual block. In other words, something that cannot be otherwise rectified by traditional therapies, doctors or medications. It is thought that these physical attacks to the body are manifestations of our past lives. They – the old us – are trying to tell us something. They are saying, pay attention. this is important.
Passage
My friend will be here any minute now. I am packing up the small meal I’ve made for us, folding the napkins, tucking it all into my bag. I am thinking of a place I’d like to show him. Tap, tap, tap. That must be him at the door.
Good Genes
She looked haggard and tired, like she’d lived a hard life. A veteran and hero of the great war that had been her life. She would have gotten a Purple Heart. She sauntered, defiant and proud in her old age, to the front of a classroom, leaning heavily on her crutches, where she would deliver the same speech as she did every time a teacher asked her to introduce students to the marvels of her library. She stood behind her podium, waiting for everyone to get back into class and resume their seats.
Love
A man of good stature leaves the CEO’s office, closing the door behind him to end the day. In a fine suit, younger than his newborn daughter, he makes his way out of the office building and to his car.
“Going home to meet the flowers,” he sings to himself.
The flowers in tune are the multi-coloured roses that were delivered to his wife this morning.
ROOTS for the Interview of
Blueprint Correspondent here! I was afforded the rare opportunity to interview the prolific writer Arthur Rousseau, who is best known for his memoirs (remarkable, considering the market is oversaturated with memoirs) and non-fiction.
Dear William
When I turned eleven, they found me in the orphanage. My orphanage.
They found me and took me and they proved with their science that I’m your descendant. Your “direct” descendant. Your great grandson, eighth generation.
“My God,” they said.
Olympic Spirit, Olympic Shame
Hey there. My name’s Jordan. I just started highschool this year in my hometown, Fort McMurray. But I’m not there right now. My family and I—that’s me, my parents and my little brother Mikey—are off to the Vancouver Olympics! It’s really exciting. In school we’ve been talking about supporting our athletes and cheering for Canada—I get to do it all live! And my family’s even more connected to all of it than lots of people, because my dad works for Petro Canada, and my mom works for RBC. They’re both supporting the Olympics. Cool, eh? The drive only takes two days!
7:43
It landed gently upon the faux marble tabletop which had been lightly soiled with spilt drops of iced tea. It stood planted, its antennae quivering in the warm breeze and its impossibly thin wings drawn tightly together as it scavenged the sugary remains.
Love Clothes
Our love is like a dirty t-shirt. When you wash away the grime, you wash away the colour; Oh, and it fades in the sunlight.
LOVE for the sacrifice of
Simranjet is a young man, working in the ore mines, somewhere in the north of Kivu, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Jordan is a teenage boy, attending high school, somewhere in the south of Ontario, Canada.
You
I love you. And you’re all over my walls. Dark, dripping, biting. This right-angled bludgeoner, covered in you. You trickle downward to the head, form a droplet, and fall to the floor. Drip into your own massacred eye sockets. Can’t you see how much I love you? This deep red romance. Not that Romeo and Juliet bullshit. This is true passion.
Love Perfected in the 21st Century
They all sat on miserable sofas…in the miserable sitting room…of Kelly’s decaying, attic apartment. By miserable, Heather only meant modern, but modern sofas were synonymous with miserable in Heather’s opinion. The acute angles and anorexic cushions, which comprised and stretched themselves across Kelly’s contemporary furniture, never persuaded Heather’s traditional tastes.
Conquer Love
I have dreamt of you in passing moments. I have relished you in memories now faded, maybe never true. And always you have left me; hand slips from my grip and your back slowly moves from my vision into the darkness of never again. And always I am crying; tears drip off my face, fall uselessly to the ground and gather around my naked feet. I am no child, I am no woman, I am no one…
FOOD for the improvement of
They had small talk for appetizers. Napkins all around because conversation is a messy process. Indeed, the words spoken or heard can cause a person the same indigestion as a spoiled ham. But, the same words read or written in the right context and for the right purpose can bring a willing subject the same nourishment as a turkey dinner. Thanksgiving anyone?
Eye of Your Apple
A lot of people come here. They have to. If they didn’t, they might shrivel up like a raisin and decompose into fertilizer. The human kind. Then they could truly aid in the growth of their own fruits and vegetables. But how useful would that be to a pile of dirt? Not very.
Bereft
A dinner tray is set before me.
Wow…this is it, is it?
Propped up in a hospital bed, against a mound of pillows, life gradually bleeding away from me, and this is what I receive for supper? I am an old woman, to be sure, who smoked incessantly, and quite stubbornly, for years…
Saint Clitoris
The clitoris is the only sex organ who’s only known function is the experiencing of pleasure. Clitoris derives from the Greek word kleitoris, which means ‘hill’ or ‘slope’. It receives its name from the manner in which it slopes upward in the shaft and forms a mound of spongy tissue at the glans.
Witch Rave
I walk just behind her into the forest. Her tangled black hair looked like a Value Village wig – long and straggly in the back, short and choppy in the front. There are places on her skin where you could see actual dirt. There is a ring of grey residue around her neck. She has some missing teeth, and those left were yellow as a harvest moon. Her eyes are glittering. I can tell she’s really psyched to be inducting me tonight.
A Subway Exchange
A dark night, probably around 1 o’clock. You’re sitting in a subway car that’s mostly empty. You and about seven other people commuting home from whatever, wherever. It doesn’t matter, as long as you get home soon, exhaustion is setting in. Walking for dozens of kilometres does that to you and the fast food “nutrition” you ate earlier didn’t help, just ebbs away the pangs of hunger eating at you.
GENDER & SEXUALITY for the understanding of
Through laughter we attempt the disarmament of another person, bringing a casual air to the conversation, and breaking down the threat of something new and unfamiliar. But laughter can also be the destruction of a new idea. They laughed. At anyone who suggested a world outside (or inside) our perception of the existing, that which we have convinced ourselves is truth and knowledge, fact and reality, and therefore unquestionable. They laughed. When the unquestionable was questioned. They laughed.
DEATH for the sake of
Editor in the alley between the fax and printer, Ed for short. Once, a trusted friend and mentor. Now, standing with authority. Judging the writers who build the paper.
Last week, an editorial faux pas. The paper, riddled with inadequacy, devastated by the scrutiny of its readers.
“What do you have to say in your defense?” asked Ed.
Alive
John Broker was a farmer. I am writing a short story about death, and these are all the words I’ve got.
John Broker was a farmer.
I sit here wondering what kind of farmer John Broker was. Livestock? Crops? Was he a good man? Yes, he was a good man. Well, he certainly felt he was. The people of the village respected him. His wife loved him. His son, however, did not.
