Table of Contents

NON - FICTION 2

POETRY 8

FICTION 15

SCREEN 23

1

ISSUE .3

II

VIII

XV

XXIII

Artwork

E. PowellPhoto 1 7

Photo 2 14Photo 3 22

E. J. CollisBahamas Beach 10Jill and Gia 20

JAN. 2 ‘15

JAN. 2 ‘15

realityDuncan Hulford

The crackling of the radio makes me sick. When I’m exhausted and I’ve not yet been

allowed to rest I sit drearily and barely upright as my skin begins to crawl. It feels like beetles

have infected my bones, feasting on my blood. Thoughts of home and endless injections of

caffeine are supposed to keep me conscious, but when I think on the pointlessness of my

presence I want to sleep. I’ll fall asleep in a ditch, I have before. I’ll fall in a cot or tiny rack

or into the black ocean and finally fall asleep into the warm acceptance of my fears. Instead

of voices on the radio giving an indication of life and purpose I hear myself saying I made a

mistake too late to undo. It would be easier just to fall. Letting the girl I love embrace another,

wildly riding him and a dozen others. Letting my children die before they are born because I

will never love someone long enough before I must leave. Letting the world and the people

I love spin without me. These nights and thoughts repeat again and again. On some nights

the stars light up the sky and the waves while glowing algae explodes with incandescence as

the ship breaches water. On these nights the radio and my thoughts stay quiet and my lungs

take in the humid air. I like these nights: good nights. After enough bad and good nights I

find myself appearing at home. Upon my recent return like a typical sailor the first thing I did

was crack open a beer and two more in rapid succession. I didn’t want to think clearly. The

city looked cold, grey and miserable yet I craved to walk its streets drunk with beer, rum and

giddiness. I haven’t lived here long, but what I love lies in possibility. In this city I have forgot-

ten a dead and imaginary love, an image of self-inadequacy and gained the knowledge home

waits where you create it. It was cold when I came back but as the months pass the green

summer and the sweat stained seat drives with my father will return. The freezing beach-white

sands will shine under the sun as snow melts and the water will be coloured clear blue, not

dark turquoise. I can laugh with my sister and friends who helped me grow into an adult here.

I can run downtown and view the early red sunset reigning on the city within twenty minutes

as I convulse in breathing clarity. I can walk in the park and see the bench where I spent an

eclipsed night with a girl I love and must say goodbye to. That’s where this high comes from:

coming home after leaving. To feel this ecstasy I slog through empty nights with a red light

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illuminating a desk of training exercises. To feel this good I must leave. Rapid breathing and

the stomach sucking panic rush back as I see her empty plastic water bottle still sitting on my

bedside table. It’s over. I throw out the bottle. It’s over and only tonight exists when the night

glows with Christmas lights. Nothing matters when my mind succumbs to duty-free rum and

the scent of her hair as we hug. I’m not going to see her after tonight. At least not as some-

one I crave to own and owns me in obsessive thought. I want to feel the city aura, a drunken

buzz and the brace of her in my arms. Her body and lips radiate in my mind, but mostly I

missed her hug and loving acceptance. I love my job. I hate its fake objective of preparing us

for war. When years of preparation drag on people want war, to fight fire and floods with the

sweat of doing a real job. The helicopter can violently vibrate the cracked metal of the ship,

yet I still sleep because of lack of reality. Lost loves, failed marriages and resentful children are

real yet danger and purpose are not. Coming home doesn’t feel real. Her lustful, wide-eyed

smile doesn’t feel real. I don’t feel real.

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The Coconut Autopsyor

Odd Smirks in the Hawaiian NightD. Cassidy

I The YVR Fish People and the Discovery of Rotted Coconuts

It was somewhere over the dark middle of the Pacific that I began to doubt the true meaning of this trip. My clan was arranged around me all down the blue row: Mother, Brother and Father, all in various states of sleep and sleeplessness thirty-thousand feet above the boiling waves. The tin can with wings had serviced us fairly for the three hours we had been underway; uncertain turbulence and sexually-dubious flight attendants aside, the trip had been rocky from the get-go. The beating red-green heart of December had been in full force when we took off from YVR, bound for the ‘beautiful’ tropical island of Maui. We were detained in border limbo by a red-headed Neo-Nazi with an eye full of hate. She smelled the rat on me and threw us all behind a big white door for about an hour while my father’s kiteboarding gear was thoroughly searched. We roared with laughter, my family and I, as grey-faced fish people stared disconso-lately at their bags sitting merely twenty feet away across a border. “Swine!” I cried with glee as the pigs let one fish after another out before us, moving in schools.

The tube posed, by nature, both an elation slash an elevation, and also therefore the threat of an Icarian fall. I knew my family was there to chase the phantasmal dream of the ‘Va-cation,’ the syndrome all North American families have succumbed to since the first time a lei was photographed—but why was I there, specifically? University finals had been completed, the sleepless nights ended, and my otherworldly, long-distance Eurydice revisited. Now, as all signs, signals and symbols and pointed to, the Vacation should be my reward. I began to feel, sitting and staring through some plastic at a plane wing flailing around outside with a red-tipped crest like the lighthouse of Hell, that I was there for all the wrong reasons. I glanced around the cabin, at the overweight, underwhelming and overwhelmed people who glowed coolly under the air-conditioning, IPads glued to their laps and socks climbing dangerously towards the knee. The young overweight girl a row in front of me giggled as a cross-eyed mouse in a grass hula skirt jiggled on screen; beside her, her mother pointed a fat sausage of a finger at the rodent’s attire. I saw it then, there, in that gesture—the death of the aboriginal, the belittlement of the people, the lessening of a culture and values. I saw a coconut rotted mys-teriously to the core and covered in eagle feathers and luggage scraps, all on a bed of floral

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prints. I decided then that what I must do, with the time granted to me by the Good God Lord Dean and his apostle professors, was a cultural autopsy. I must, with the scalpel of a cracked me-chanical pencil and the ink of a drinking problem, dissect the Coconut, that ephemeral place and that ephemeral dream, and find the heart of the matter, the bleeding pig— the Lord of the Flies was not the head, no, but that half-digested pig heart in a young white boys stomach on some deserted isle. I would discover this dark crystal, despite the smirks of the reader or the viewer or the insipid.These are my findings.

II Sun-Stroke, Morpheus and Discovery

It was on the drive back to the hotel on the following eve when I started to have a more se-rious breakdown. We were streaming back from a four-hour sun glare where the only respite was the repetitive downing of as many beers as you can get your shaking hands on—in short, I was hammered, and stranded in the middle of a bout of heatstroke. I had strapped myself into the back, screwed my ear-buds straight into the side of my head and cranked the Daft Punk Discovery album to almost full volume: the ragged beats and wicked-smooth grooves ripped through my feverish mind, tearing small vinyl tracks on the inside of my skull like inverted zip-ties. The little sliver car screamed through the deepening eve—the Silver Fox lingered here, too—dipping and licking around the road. I stared through the tinted windows at the island countryside, endless, riveting: it stretched on and on up the ribald peaks and undoubtedly further until reaching the crumbling pit of Genesis, that mouth of Hell that puked forth the thing we drove on now. Ground beneath our wheels, tires, feet; shelter for these people, for the now dead culture. Was this the Coconut?

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I turned cautiously, looking at the rest of my clan, all burnt and sun-consumed as I. How long before I started gibbering madly at these poor people? They hadn’t spent any real time with me for about four months: I didn’t want them to know how deep into madness I had sunk, was sinking—the neo-Nazi at the airport, she had known, she had known the madness in me and her and everyone and in a last act of bootlick spite she slammed us into that hell-ish limbo with the fish. I couldn’t get that aquarium full of pigs out of my head: that magnetic code-release door sat behind my eyeballs and burning retinas, somewhere along the optic nerve, mired in a quagmire of sticky travel errors. Pull it together kid: look at the island for crissakes. As if on cue rainbows began to twinkle madly in the disquieting light, cascading around the island from some ethereal palm: Morpheus— Dream—he stood over the island, looking for his lost son, his lost mad son. I turned my face to the boiling clouds, I, the one who does not sleep, never truly sleeps: come for me now. My ascension is prepared. The car swerved around a pick-up; I was knocked back into this reality. I shivered, look-ing at the thoughts that had just spun their grains through my brain. They were cursed—I was cursed—cursed to always think think think think… Fuck! I couldn’t shake the queerness of my own head: the visions around me were too enthralling, too enrapturing: how could I ever divine a plan or path from this hellish place? Not the mouth of Genesis, I realized, but of Golgotha. My personal Golgotha. I turned and looked again. Island madness? Perhaps the Death of the Coconut was actually an environmental uppercut derived over thousands and thousands of developmen-tal years—infecting the Europeans as they came in their long-garters and long-ships, driving them to colonize an awkward people who were clearly better left alone. And now, years and years later, among them, the people still live and exist, their culture a buffet for travelers to pick through like highwaymen. Robbing them blind in the beautiful country of their birth. We turned in to the hotel: I had made it with only a few jabbering quips about ‘non-Eu-clidean architecture’ and half-whispered ‘rainbows god-damn rainbows’. I would retire for the evening to muse on what I had wrought: perhaps this ill-fated self-assigned idiocy would discover the rotted carcass of whatever stank at the heart of my dealings here.

This is a serialized story, releasing over the next several issues in parts of two.

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Emma Powell

I, 2015

Photography

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WavesJames Porter

Waves pulsefrequencies from oceanic oscillators

that wetsuited monkeys beg for.Their fingers reaching

for piano keys beneath the surface.

Hearts beat, Timeslows.

Here in the green seawhere ears wait patiently

for the tickof a tidal metronome.

I wash up on this shorefrequently

my mind at the mercyof organic synthesizers

Neuron currentsthat switch between sine and saw-tooth

and throw me to the sandy bottomunderneath a symphony of distorted beach break.

It floods my lungsand leaves mewith a choice

to quit quietly?Or

to go on

Waves pulse, as the wet-suited monkey paddlesback out

away from needless thoughtto the rhythm of the water

WavesJames Porter

Waves pulsefrequencies from oceanic oscillators

that wetsuited monkeys beg for.Their fingers reaching

for piano keys beneath the surface.

Hearts beat, Timeslows.

Here in the green seawhere ears wait patiently

for the tickof a tidal metronome.

I wash up on this shorefrequently

my mind at the mercyof organic synthesizers

Neuron currentsthat switch between sine and saw-tooth

and throw me to the sandy bottomunderneath a symphony of distorted beach break.

It floods my lungsand leaves mewith a choice

to quit quietly?Or

to go on

Waves pulse, as the wet-suited monkey paddlesback out

away from needless thoughtto the rhythm of the water

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pendent opera interruptako’b (Kingsley O’Bedlam)

for these last few months he had started to recognizeless and less the likeness he held nowfrom the likeness he had held up tothese last few months. he used tocatch his reflection

often to take a moment and remarkto himself on his deep-seated self awareness.but change had come swiftly.

living alone far-estranged1 from the worldhe had grown up in his habits began to liquefy,conforming in a new shape to his present, solidifyingin a recomposition of the things that he was.this was something he rather enjoyed in his,now inherent,perception of his own indefinity.

:3Adam Chan

We promised we’d always be honest with each otherAnd to date I’ve never lied.Except for maybe whenI call her ugly.

1 a touch of madness in their composition

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Emily Joy Collis

Bahamas Beach, 2015

Watercolour

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The Mary RoseKatie Garagan

The wind, hauntinglike a humpback’s song,flows between the frayedmainsail and mizzen.

She rolls in and overthe swelling sea.Her wooded hull creaksunder the wavering pressure.

The Captain grips the wheel with one hand;in the other, clingsto a compass whose tirelesshand reaches for north.

A holler from on deck,like a magnet, pulls at the crew.

Her mess oozes adrenalineas sailors scramble to their posts,leaving the tables vacant, strewn with salt beef and aletrickling from toppled tankardsinto cracks on the floor.

On her gun deck, broadsidecannons are readiedfor a French Galley stalks the horizon.

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That Goats May LiveColten Dom

to the atom-sick goat at a crossroads: thank youyou gave us 48 kilograms of shared meanness (bonus chewed cud)so we didn’t have to

a blood transfusion, for radiation sickness— similar bodily fluids, and your legs tied downby men with masks and college degreesand probably kids of their own

your starchy beard smells singed, sir goatyou were a sailor, for an hour or two:maybe it still tastes of salt?

must you go, sir goat? we’ve spent barely enough time with you— “more conscious of its situation than the masked doctor’s around it”—oh, you know best then

off to dreams of protonic sunson the tropical beach of your heritage:look down— you’re surfingyour bikini looks lovely

the ledger will say ‘medical experimentation’ probably

CD

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FatherJames Porter

Father I see myself in you

In your skillful handsThat turn wood to wonderAnd canvas to captivation

But I fall behind where you exceedIn your wisdom that never fails

That never oversteps or overshadowsIn your voice that rings with many thingsHumour, intellect, encouragement, love

But never judgement, never disappointment. In these ways dad,

I will always be a childStumbling in your footsteps

As you look back and smile with your eyesAnd wait patiently for me to catch up

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Emma Powell

II, 2015

Photography

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Slate and ClamshellColten Dom

The sound of water moved through the cabin and the dark poured in at the windows. A man sat in a chair with his eyes closed and his palms upwards on his knees. A fire whispered in the wall across from him. He had dark mangled hair that licked away from his face, always pushing back towards his neck, and two thick wings of ash at the temples. His nose was crooked from a break and an incompetent fix, and his eyelashes were strikingly long and clotted together like swathes of wheat. He opened his eyes and filled his nose with the air in the cabin. He smelled the sea and the fire and strong scent his own body— not a bad smell, just one of salt and cigarette smoke and roof tar, with the faint hint of sweat that hangs around men by the sea. He stood up, and he was average height. The man walked across the room and pulled a skip of sandalwood from the wood pile and placed it on the fire. The scent of sandalwood released through the cabin, moving over the scent of the sea and the old fire and the man, and went out through the windows. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a red-foiled pack of cigarettes. The waves scudded soft and then hard against the rocks, and he looked at the blackness out the window. A match caught on a rough thumbnail like a white clamshell, and the light was raised to the stick in his mouth, and the light caught along his jaws and mandible and there was a rough-ness of tawny stubble there.

A boat motor whistled throatily in the night, growling as it came closer; a honk echoed down by the pier, and then the whistle fell away again. Soon there was a knock at the door: the man coughed out an invitation, and a girl with a new suitcase entered from outside. They exchanged curt pleasantries. She looked like the kind of dream you read about, and was dressed in the trappings of a librarian— not of the old maid variety, but one of the rare kinds that feature in books young and lonely men and women read on quiet nights. She had mysterious hair that looked almost white in the firelight and an air of sweetness that was at no time faux naïf. Her hands did not look soft but like cracked porcelain, and her eyebrows curtsied like naturals. At some point the girl said: “Does it always rain here?” “Enough to top off the gutters.” The man ran long grey fingers through his hair, and one could imagine a sound like dry brush snapping. “Will it be a problem?” “I only ask because of the barrel ride coming out here.” “The tub went over the falls eh?” The man laughed like the fire barked, and the girl smiled. “Yeah.” She finally pulled off her coat. “And then some.”

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above the bedrooms, in the top of the lighthouse. They walked slowly around the unlit lamp while the girl talked and pointed at shiny things. “A lanthorn, not a service room, it was called in the old days.” She rolled brilliance off her tongue aimlessly, and the man walked a step behind her picking it up with his ears. She trotted to the storm panes and looked out at the dim stars. Her silvered finger ran down the astragals, one by one. She turned on her heels and paced to the modified Fresnel, appreciating its curves and figure. “The keeper would have to throw his Rembrandt when they cleaned this thing. Their clothing would have scratched the glass, if it was wool, so the linen smock was a go-go.” She touched her t-shirt. “I wonder if this could polish.” “You could polish the Ark of the Covenant with a rag like that.” The man said. They moved back to the window, and looked out over the water as far as the night would let them. “Purer than snow.” Then they were silent. The water began to come alive, burning green and blue and white under a canvas of stars. The man took her shoulder and pointed to an inconsequential switch wired up against the catwalk baluster. “Flick it to see a shooting star.”

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He closed his eyes for a moment and lis-tened to the wind. He nodded to himself. “It’s not raining, not anymore. At least not here.” “No?” The girl looked out the window at the black. “No.” A pause followed, and it was made easy by the fire and the sound. The man offered the girl a cigarette between two clamshells. “Thanks, no thanks. I don’t smoke.” “I won’t tell your lungs.” “Well...” She started, and ended by taking the cigarette. They smoked in silence until the man spoke again. “Well. Would you like to see the book?” “Where is it?” “Upstairs, a ways.”

On another night the sink in the girls’ adopted room was damp with the afterglow of plati-num-blonde hair dye. The man and the girl stood

She looked at him as if he had told her it granted wishes. “You mean turn it on?” “Send it to the moon and back.” She walked over and put the spark through, and then the revolving light was passing over them. They were silhouetted in acts, the girl grinning to the water and the man smiling at the Fresnel. And far out on the dark sea noble pairs of dolphins passed rudderless on the high waves of war.

Another night the sink was freshly dripped with enough copper dye to make Pollock jealous. The girl sat with curled legs in the cabin with a cigarette in her mouth and newly reddened hair, and the man sat a little ways off carving soap. Her nose was deep enough in the white book to smell what country the ink came from, but she pulled herself out and gingerly closed it. Her cracked hands went up to press her head, praying at her temples, and she asked: “Why is it always night here?” The man looked at her. It was probably a question someone else had asked. It was cer-tainly a question he had asked himself. He set down the knife and the soap. “A fair bit ago, in Hollywood— and listen, no story about Hollywood is fake, on prin-ciple— a couple of young tough guys took on a mystery novel put out by an old tough guy, and decided to script a movie. They built it up, and the proposal was brilliant, a success. The production kids wrapped a towel around it and bought it out champagne. It was that good, dig?” The man held his hand out, and she placed the cigarette in it, and he took a drag. “But towards the finale, after getting an honest deal of the book into the film, they hit a snag. All the young sharps got together and talked it over, but in the end they had to cable the famous old guy. ‘We’ve all read the thing back to front,’ they said, ‘but for the life of us no one can figure out who, in fact, killed the chauffeur’— the crux of the novel. They sent it off, and I’m sure they waited around the board table with cigarettes and coffees in their fists, just itching to get back to writing.” He took another drag, and she held her hand out, and she took a drag. “The old man, the professional, cabled back two words: ‘No idea.’”

On another night the sink was actually scrubbed, but not well enough to curb bright new lines of purple dye. The girl came down into the cabin the way a feather falls. She wore a long shirt about her shoulders and her waist and the tops of her thighs, and nothing else. Her hair fell in long slants like lilacs in the dark. The man sat reading in his usual cold-water clothes. He heard the creaking and saw the angel coming down. Her cheeks were rosy, and she went and sat near to him. The man closed the white book and stared at her. She stared back, and he absentmindedly popped his knuck-les against the spine.

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“What are you?” She asked. The man inclined his head and the light caught on the jaw, and said nothing. “What do you do?” She asked again. “Which do you want, my passport or my license?” She thought a little and edged closer to him. She poked him with a purple-stained fin-ger. “Are you a chauffeur?” She asked with a grin. He shook his head. “No, I’m no chauffeur. I’m a man and that’s that. Maybe an oarsman at a stretch.” She nodded, and leaned like a tower in Italy. Their arms touched. “What are you?” He asked distantly. “I don’t quite know yet.” She touched her t-shirt. “Whatever I want to be. I’ll be a woman, for now.” He nodded and swallowed lightly. She stood up and took his hand, and felt the raw-hide of callous stretched about the base of his grey fingers. Then he twisted his wrist and

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and touched their palms together. Her hand was like a cracked white jar held by a stone statue. She took him to his feet, and they walked quietly up the catwalk hand in hand with the girl leading the way.

Another night, the sink in the man’s bedroom was clean and the wind was quiet around the cabin. The woman had washed the dye out, and was about to start the process anew when she imagined she heard the sound of ripping pages. The catwalk was colder than a broken lighter on her bare feet, and nearly as painful. The woman emerged from the cabin door: all around swirled the eddies of a black-ened sea, and drops of lantern light dripped down steppes of sea-scrubbed rock to the edge of the water. She took some steps out and looked up into the precipice of darkness, and as she looked her eyes switched films and the stars in their millions began to look back, and within a minute the night was Gogh-like in its blue depths. The man stood hard by the edge of the water and in his gnarled hands were scraps of

the white book. The woman came close to him and laid her hands against his shoulders, and under the skin she felt tightness and the cords of muscle slowly retracting. “Sorry.” He said to her, and to the ocean. “It’s your book.” “Not really.” He sighed. “Not after you sowed it up and put the legs back on it.” She sat down on the ragged slate of the edge. He sat down too. The sea had a dead-ness of calm in it, and fragments and shards of coarse paper and book binding bobbed in the sea. At random the woman thrust her hand into the water and pulled out a scrap. It read: —notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion — embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst— He leaned against her shoulder, and they both looked up at the stars, and he spoke. “It does something to you. It’ll put a fire in your soul and then the desk won’t be good enough. Then the house won’t be good enough, and nothing will be good enough or get better because there are a hundred million dirty people grubbing in the same dirt you are. And if you take it the other way it’s the bum’s rush and train yards and a hundred million tent cities that smell like booze. I’ve seen it and I’ve done it, and nobody should do that.” She took his hand in hers, and he turned in to her and put his face in her hair, which was white again. “Nothing’s better than anything else.” She said. “Take it as it comes.” And with that she raised her hand and over the desolate sea she traced in space the outline of the lighthouse.

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Emily Joy Collis

Jill and Gia, 2015

Graphite

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BathosAdam Chan

We walked up the stairs, leaving the snow covered street behind us. The snow was ugly, and brown, and had long turned from powder to slush. Inside, the air was warm and inviting. I slumped down on my couch, and stripped away my heavy jacket. She didn’t take off hers. I saw her again recently at a Christmas party. There were awkward smiles and forced laughter. Then there were wide smiles and easy laughter. She pulled me in for a hug, and with her arms around me I could smell her hair. She uses a different shampoo now. I still wear the same cologne.

21

Emma Powell

III, 2015

Photography

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DiversionChris Smith

FADE IN:

INT. VAN - DAY

A man, JOHNNY, 25, medium build with brown hair down to hisshoulders, drives down a paved road along the ocean shore.Music can be heard lightly from the radio.

Johnny rips off a fake mustache from his face.

There are two duffel bags in the back seat.

EXT. COUNTRY ROAD - DAY

BECK, a 28 year old man, medium build with a mustache,drives up a country road in the middle of nowhere in an oldrusty truck. The truck drives roughly and is covered withdried-on mud.

INT. BECK’S TRUCK - DAY

In the passenger seat sits a small dog, BUDDY, lookingstraight ahead through the windshield.

Beck looks down at his fuel tank gauge as it flickers nearempty.

The vehicle starts to run very roughly and Beck starts topull off to the side of the road. The gas runs dry, and thetruck comes to a stop.

Beck sighs.

Blood can be seen soaking through his shirt by his stomach.A small bullet hole can be seen in the center of the bloodymess.

He lightly touches his finger on the hole, grunting withsensitivity to the pain.

EXT. COUNTRY ROAD - DAY

Beck exits the truck and starts to take a piss on the frontleft tire of the truck.

A giant twenty-ton truck drives by and Beck adjusts his

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angle of view in order to hide the blood on himself.

The strong wind of the truck stirs up dust in the air. Beckcoughs until he groans with pain in his chest.

He climbs back into the drivers seat.

INT. BECK’S TRUCK - DAY

He looks to Buddy, who is sitting calmly on the seat.

BECKI guess this is it then.

Beck pulls out a flask of whiskey and takes a swig. Buddylooks Beck in the eye.

BECKWhat? This is what we expected was gonna happen. It’s all for thebest.

Beck reclines his seat slightly.

BECKGoodnight buddy.

Beck closes his eyes.

A few moments later Buddy begins to whine.

Beck ignores it.

The whining gets louder.

BECKHey shut up! Don’t you worry, someones gonna look after you soon enough.

Beck glances in the rear view mirror and sees a COP CARpulling over behind him.

Beck sits up straight and tries to make himself look presentable.

He frantically grabs Buddy and holds him on his lap, covering the bul-let wound.

An OFFICER walks up to his window.

OFFICERAfternoon sir, now what brings you to be pulled over here out in the

middle’a goddamn nowhere?

BECKAh just had to take a piss ya know? Haven’t been any good stops formiles.

The officer sniffs the air and looks down at where Beck hadjust relieved himself.

OFFICERCould I get some identification andregistration please?

BECKYeah yeah.

Beck leans over to reach into the glove box.

As Beck is leaning, the officer notices blood dripping atthe bottom of Becks shirt.

Beck hands the officer the papers.

OFFICERI’m gonna need you to step out of the vehicle sir.

Beck pauses with a confused look on his face.

Beck is about to exit the vehicle when he notices a whitetwo-door car drive past. Inside the silhouette of three mencan be seen.

His face drops.

Beck opens the door, turns to the officer, whips out ahandgun and fires with no hesitation.

The officer drops.

OFFICERYou son of a bitch.

The officer goes unconscious.

Buddy is barking his head off. Beck is staring down the roadtowards where the white car drove past.

Beck grabs his dog and carries him to the cop car.

He quickly drags the drags the officer’s body into the drivers seat of

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his truck.

He walks around to the passenger door and folds the frontseat forward. In the back seat sit two duffel bags.

He lifts them out and shuts the door back up.

He walks the duffel bags toward the cop car and puts them onthe floor of the back seat.

He goes back to his truck and puts it in neutral and pushesit off the side of the road and into the ditch.

More blood is now dripping from his shirt and onto the dirt.As he walks to the cop car, blood drips leave a distincttrail.

Beck starts the cop car. His dog is looking at him shiveringand crying softly.

BECKWhat? None of this matters anyway. Johnny’s already long past theborder by now and those fools are still hunting me down!

Beck pulls out a cigarette from his front shirt pocket,blood staining the bottom of the pack. He lights it andsmokes. He looks back at the duffel bags.

BECKThis is what I signed up for.

He starts down the road in the direction the white vehiclepreviously was heading.

The road gains larger and larger swells causing continuousblind hills.

All of a sudden Beck sees the vehicle now in the oppositelane passing by him.

He rips a U-turn and heads for them.

Excerpt taken from Chris Smith’s screenplay ‘Diversion.’

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STAFF CORNER

Argot is proud to present our third issue. I would like to thank our contributing author’s, poets

and artists from outside the staff for supplying such exciting and driven content, and for making this

issue the most colourful and well-designed to date.

Moving into 2016, I would also like to thank all of our new and returning readers. Also, a spe-

cial thanks to the staff of Argot., who have now put together an entire publication three months in a

row. Here’s looking forward to the new year and new issues.

Sincerely, Colten Dom Editor-In-Chief

“Argot is a digital publication built from submissions by the youth of Victoria,

B.C. We are a non-profit specializing in giving students and writers from all back-

grounds publication experience; from working in-depth with our talented editors

to actual publication, our aim is working together to produce a monthly collec-

tive of literary merit.”

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Cover photography by Emma Powell

Contributing Writers and Artists:James Porter

Duncan Hulford

Kingsley O’Bedlam

Chris Smith

STAFF

Colten Dom: Editor-in-Chief

Aleya Dwivedi: Public Relations Director

Katie Garagan: Fiction and CNF Editor

Drew Evagreens: Poetry Editor

Spencer Thompson: Fiction Editor

Emily Collis: Stage, Screen and Fiction Editor

Adam Chan: Fiction Editor

Emma Powell: Fiction Editor

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Want to submit? Go to

http://argotcollective.com/submissions/

to view the guidelines, and email your work to

submissions.argotstaff@gmail.com !

Questions? Email us at

argotstaff@gmail.com

to find out more!