Geoffrey Line

I am coming to your city to save you, said the handsome man on the TV. He wagged his finger at the camera, at Gabriel and his corpulent mother fused to the pleather couch, and he said to them that he was coming to their city to save their souls. Mark the date!

The Malahat Review, established in 1967, is among Canada's leading literary journals. Published quarterly, it features contemporary Canadian and international works of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction as well as reviews of recently published Canadian poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction.

A satire and tribute to DFW, on one of the web's first literary magazines, where he and Saunders, Bolano, Ben Marcus, Simon Rich and others published their fiction.

Before that year of plane crashes, the boys skipped past the playground to see the dragon behind the portables. The beast slumbered atop a damp bed of grass clippings left behind by the man who mowed the school lawn.

He was tanned, dark-haired and hungry, the boy who got stuck in the vending machine. He had an adorable little smile that warmed you like the wittiest kind of greeting cards. Judging by the events that transpired in the train station that day, he was starving and under no adult supervision. If he was, his guardians were guilty of negligence.

When Petra was little her papa hurt her, and so she put her heart in bubble wrap. Layer upon layer upon layer of unspooled, suffocating plastic that padded her vital organ in an impenetrable fortress that could go anywhere, endure anything, no matter the fragility of its contents.

My stepson, Jesus Christ, doesn’t like me. He knows I’m not his father. He tells me all the time. The other day, when I asked him to sweep the sawdust from the carpentry shop, he threw the broom to the floor and shouted, “You’re not my real dad. I’m the Son of God!”

A short story selected as a finalist in a fiction contest judged by Pulitzer Prize nominated novelist Karen Russell.

Like a penny into a fountain, she fell from the top deck of a cruise ship into the black Caribbean. Tink, poor Tink, prepubescent, precocious, ten-year-old Tink, the most adorable preteen you’d have ever laid eyes on.