ALT “I know your hopes and your dreams and your fantasies. I know what you thought life would be, and what you now know it is. And I know you could’ve easily died out there in that ice cold prairie. You had a foolproof method in mind. But you did the hard thing instead. You came back home to Montreal, moved back in with your mom, took the Effexor that made you fat, and grinded your shitass bones into the unsexy work of living.”

ALT Vincent moves on the shelves where they keep extra stock. He takes a can of lukewarm AriZona iced tea right off the wall and cracks it open. He upturns the can, letting its contents pour out into the bucket. Once drained, he tosses the can aside and reaches for a tall bottle of Labatt Bleue, which he empties just the same—dark, ambery liquid guzzling into the plastic bucket with a gluck-gluck-gluck. Veronica feels dizzy with horror. “What the fuck,” she says, tearing off her face mask. “Are you going to pay for that?” “I don’t have any Earth money on me,” Vincent says quite gently, tearing open a packet of Fuzzy Peaches and then tossing them into the brew. “But you can forward the bill to the Northern Celestial Embassy. They’ll cover it.”

ALT Some people carry themselves with an immediately identifiable air of intelligence. Veronica is quite the opposite: she was born with blank, moronic features. Her resting expression is a slack gawp. And her eyes—god fucking damn it, her big, dark, stupid cow eyes. They meet with the men, round and black and vacant. They swivel, they pan; they’re flat, inert; two glasses of Coca-Cola left out in the hot sun. Two holes in a mask. Idiot-eyes.

ALT The store clears out. The work remains. Veronica stocks the shelves with milk, Heineken, Coca-Cola. Little tintack cases of mints. She fills up the slush machines, watches in a kind of daze as sodium-silver syrup—a flavor inscrutably titled White Mystery—sluices into its clear plastic receptacle. She mops up near the coffee machine, shucks Pall Malls from their cartons, stacks solid sacks of sugar and salt. And when there’s nothing left to do, she squats down to sit on the little step stool they keep behind the register—a daring and illicit act—and lets a perfect beam of Montrealais sunshine pool over her oily, pockmarked face. The light is sweet, enlivening. The A/C at her back is equally delicious. Cold nothing. Kind nothing.

ALT She’d known then that if she chose to die, it would be weeks before her family found out. Her roommates wouldn’t search for her, not until her disappearance was absolutely impossible to ignore. Meanwhile, her family was accustomed to her long silences; she slid off the brain quite easily.

ALT Behind the counter, behind plastic, behind a baby blue mask, an ugly girl lies draped over the scratch ticket display. One elbow is braced over Roue de Fortune. The other obscures Mots Cachés. There are two pins clasped to the front of her screen-woven polo. The first is a big red macaron inscribed with bold text, ungently reminding anyone who might be staring at her right breast that the sale of tobacco products to minors is prohibited, and that anyone under twenty-five will be carded, C’EST LA LOI! The other pin is a nametag. It says Veronica.

ALT White text on red background that reads, "Like fanfiction, the short story is often derided in comparison to the novel, and many believe that fanfiction/short stories are inherently “practice writing” for a supposedly superior form. In her introduction to the 1983 edition of Best American Short Stories, Ann Tyler says, “The most appealing short story writer is the one who’s a wastrel. He neither hoards his best ideas for something more ‘important’ (a novel) nor skimps on his material because this is ‘only’ a short story.” When I think of a wastrel writer, I think of the miracle of finding that perfect longfic in a nearly empty fandom or ship tag, knowing that somewhere some stranger saw/read/played a piece of media, went, “I have Thoughts,” and proceeded to churn out a five-digit word count of some of the most gorgeous prose you’ve ever read in your life. God bless the wastrel writer."

ALT White text on red background that reads, "In brief: short stories implode, novels explode. By “implosion” I mean short stories don’t necessarily work toward a climax but more often what I can an “illuminating moment,” a moment which, once reached, casts the rest of the story in a new light."

ALT White font on dark red background that reads "We're Back!"