TOK: Writing the New Toronto - Book 5
The fifth installment of the TOK series gets back into the nooks and crannies of Toronto—the corners of the city that appear to be tucked just out sight but are the setting for stories that ring true for so many Canadians. TOK 5 features Anthony De Sa, Emma Donoghue, Nalo Hopkinson, Shyam Selvadurai, M.G. Vassanji plus 13 emerging writers.
Published by Zephyr Press
Excerpts from TOK: Writing the New Toronto - Book 5
Her head was slightly tilted and her cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth. She placed her ear close to the cool, green rind of a watermelon and knocked. She caught me staring.
There was a time at Dufferin station when the black / lines that ridged that mud pigeon’s wings reminded me of wound / stripes on a war uniform...
I didn’t realize how big Toronto was until my dad dragged me along on his missions. He’d load me up with toys and candy and tell me to keep my arm inside the opened window.
Clara’s well into her thirties now, but she can hoof it enough for the chorus line, and hold a tune if it’s catchy. It’s her first season touring with Sam T. Jack’s Creoles, “the pre-eminent terpsichorean diversions of the day in the Afro-American line.”
my stare / goes from the plate / to the dainty language on the menu Golden Baskets, a tiny quintet / of brittle pastry shells...
Amba sits alone in her brother’s small basement rental, warming her hands around a cup of tea. Bars of weak sunlight dip in through the window, painting stripes on the vinyl flooring and over the pile of laundry she has gathered.
As soon as I saw him leaning up against the tent’s support wires, his shoulders hunched to keep the rain out of his collar, I knew he’d be the photograph that would make the cover that month.
cold weather birds / redouble efforts, / wrenching / invisible crumbs / from dirty ice...
Eva had light brown skin that was as smooth and glossy as polished stone. Carol always wondered how it was that skin could be so smooth—and so soft. Eva’s skin smelled of soap and Nivea.
Weekends without her son are lonely ones, and Linea fills them up with her have-to list. Today is one of those days, and she finds herself heading downtown to visit a co-worker who’s recently had her second child, a girl. Linea goes early, to avoid the inevitable jostling on the Dundas streetcar.
Cranston woke into a bougainvillea-petalled morning, a rosy-fingered dawn of a morning. Soft, pinkish sunlight was streaming its way down from the bedroom skylight, his husband Sir Maracle was sprawled and snoring gently beside him, and Rose of Sharon was crouched on his chest, eyes closed in bliss, the low, vibrating hum of her purring making sleepy syncopation with Sir Maracle’s snores.
Rafiq Latif, handcuffed and his eyes glistening with tears, stood at the front door of his parents’ townhouse with Police Sergeant Robert Jennings. He turned to his mother, Ruksana, and muttered in muted anger, “Ammi, I did nothing wrong.”
“We’re going back to Barbados,” my mother announces. She says this as she stands in her kitchen, wearing beige capris, black t-shirt and slippers. She is suburbia incarnate. She says it surrounded by dishes my dad has dirtied but refused to wash.
The news of your birth disturbed and excited the city. For weeks afterward, the grainy surveillance featured on local and national news broadcasts. A still from the footage appeared on the front page of The Globe and Mail and on posters displayed in post offices, subway stations and grocery stores.
It’s spring. The sparrow dies instantly. Quick / bang, the streetcar suspended. Small black / body. You can still see white, speckled, small / grains of rice across the back, twittering youth...
On a Saturday morning Mulla Jamaluddin was explaining a dakhila, an example, to his young pupils in a classroom in the grand new Salam-e-din Mosque in Toronto’s Rosecliffe Park neighbourhood.
Daddy tears at the Styrofoam cup, making snowflakes. I stare out the window at the real snow, longing for the bite against my cheeks.
“How have you been sleeping?” he asks.
After I spent the summer working at a bookstore on Queen Street, my return to York University, for my third year, filled me with dismay. The university’s hideous grey buildings were scattered about a windswept landscape and reminded me of large boulders that a glacier had abandoned as it drew back.
