Unpublished Newswire
Two months after the government sent back his identity card in an envelope with no return address, Khalid knocked on his family’s door in the wee hours of an early August day. I’m told, by those who claim to have witnessed his unexpected return, that his younger brother found an eerie figure in the doorway that he didn’t recognize in the dim lights of the staircase. The brother puffed out his chest and asked the assumed stranger who he was and what had brought him there at that hour.
I’m told that the kid used his newly acquired deep voice, which he had developed on the day of his...
July 30, 2025 - 06:29 | Danny Ramadan | Walrus
to Mom
A stillness in the hands I hate to watch
was an untrue line I wrote about the clock’s
(a.k.a. yours) decades ago when you’d catch
a bright yolk in its eggshell demitasse, switch
it between each half to drain the would-be froth.
A stillness in the hands I hate to watch
was even false about the clock; you’d catch each
lapse (i.e. Dad’s heart) and make it tick again. Broccoli,
star anise whole . . . I study your lists to catch
your hand around the pen, the steady twitch
that made this cursive live. If I would strike
A...
July 30, 2025 - 06:29 | Barbara Nickel | Walrus
And then came the day when we had written enough lists,
drunk enough serums, procured the perfect rice cooker, been kind
enough to ourselves and our neighbours. Could fit again
in the black-mesh, embroidered, bird-of-paradise dress,
could craft a cummerbund, train a wombat to hang, sloth-like,
from a sugar maple. The elephants had been transported
from circus to reserve, we’d re-inflated the drowned moon,
dredged the pond for our little lost boot. So then we sat,
growing older by breaking open while the knotty grubs
processed their way through the planet. There, now. There, there.
The...
July 30, 2025 - 06:29 | Sarah Wolfson | Walrus
There’s surveillance video. The screen displaying nine squares, and in each square, a different aisle, a corner, the check-out counter, every part of the store visible. The aisles sometimes humming with emptiness, a soundless hum, the pixels building to a vibration of stillness that occasionally breaks up the image, like the sleek fur of an animal bothered by a fly. The image shivers. It can’t contain the stillness, lying in wait, a predator, in the soft grey palette of surveillance video. The nuanced delicate shift in a thousand different greys and whites and darkish greys, but mostly...
July 30, 2025 - 06:29 | Lisa Moore | Walrus
Rowan bought the green suit right after her miscarriage. She’d gone on a twilight walk, her eyes scanning the ground, the sky, the other pedestrians for solace, when the suit caught her attention. It glowed from the store window. A bright, emerald shout of confidence, the colour of life itself, a promise that things would get better. She purchased the suit then and there, wore it out of the store, and had kept it on ever since.
It is rare enough to find an item of clothing that fits well, looks great, and is made to last. Rarer still to find one that, mysteriously, all but cured her of...
July 30, 2025 - 06:29 | Cohen Ewart | Walrus
Sentencing submissions are expected today for a teen girl found guilty of manslaughter in a fatal swarming attack on a homeless Toronto man.
July 30, 2025 - 06:17 | Globalnews Digital | Global News - Canada
