4. mississauga Something strange happened to me today. It happened when I was walking home from work. I say "work" but what I really mean is one of my side-gigs, a contract job sketching little girls at a birthday party. Her name was Hilary—or was it, Haley? Doesn't matter. What matters is I was in a foul mood. A culmination of weeks, no, months, feeling unfulfilled. I had been supplementing work for nearly sixteen months now that my contract at The Tribune was terminated. I was their resident cartoonist (a word I've come to hate these past few years), pumping out silly five-strip comics for what remained of the paper's readership. Like the major outlets, the Mississauga Tribune migrated to an online platform that utilized all the latest social media outlets. Work came and went depending on the amount of clicks they garnered in a year. I was lucky to nab my position after graduating from the animation program at Sheridan College, with a solid portfolio that ...

There are some moments in your life that make you question everything that has brought you to a specific moment, and I believe I just experienced one. I’m not sure what I would describe my experience as; like I know what I saw, but I don’t know what would have caused that. What I do know is that I experienced a deep, chilling, primal fear that gripped my spine harder than anything else. What I know is that for the last four hours, ever since it happened, I haven’t been able to stop shaking. I’m more scared than I ever have been in my life; much more terrified than I ever was as a child. The darkness that I once welcomed as a calming reprise at the end of my day now initiated a fight-or-flight response that wouldn’t leave me. I wanted to crawl into a hole and bury myself to hide from the world, but instead I find myself in front of my laptop typing this out while I take pull off of a previously full bottle of tequila. My head is getting a little heavy and numb, so I’ll have to typ...

  3. toronto "Do you like the band?" "Hm?" Her attention is fixed on the CN Tower. Though shade protects them from the incredible summer heat, her chilly detachment comes from a swelling sense of dissatisfaction. "I said do you like the band? They're kinda shitty." She turns back to the stage: a four piece punk band blisters through a particularly aggressive anthem about teenage rebellion. It's all noise to her, anyway. She doesn't like punk. She doesn't even like the main band he's asked her to see. Press her, and she wouldn't even be able to name three of their songs. But it's a night out. An opportunity to see live music and have a few drinks. A chance to maybe mend things between them, she reasons. "Mack?" Owen says. "Did you hear me?" She can't—the music's loud, but she's still lost in a daze. The tower, so like a needle piercing the clear blue sky, is hypnotizing. She wonders what it would b...