Unpublished Newswire

My parents purchased their burial plots nearly forty years ago. My mother likes to pull out the story about what a great deal they got because the plots were a cemetery resale—the previous owners, then in the midst of a divorce, wanted to make their separation eternal. Years later, mom says, one of their descendants tried to reverse the deal and buy back the land. To which my father said, “Fuck him.” I always laugh at this joke, not because it’s likely embellished (my dad rarely, if ever, cursed) but because who shops for graves in their prime? In rude health? Still in their...

J ust leave it Don’t call him Two consecutive texts from my aunt, following a series of messages in which she told me that my mother, who is in her mid-sixties, was dizzy, throwing up, and unable to open her eyes. That Mum might need to go to the emergency room and that my aunt needed help. The “him” in question was my brother Ornab, thirty-seven years old and two years younger than me. My aunt’s flurry of thoughts came to me on the last day of January this year, around 7 p.m. in Paris, where I live, from Toronto, still in its afternoon. Ornab lives fifteen minutes from my mum and my...