She sleeps like a dead weight now beside me, lowered into the night, the ropes of the day swaying around her. We know nothing about each other really. She does not know how often my ex-lover visits me ... [+]
Ria Hill is a queer, Jewish writer and librarian who lives in Toronto. Their work is primarily horror, with fiction appearing in several print anthologies and online magazines. They can be found online at riahill.weebly.com and on various social media platforms @riawritten. "Pinhole" is in Short Circuit #15, Short Édition's quarterly review.
Hattie didn't mind the children. They were about the only people on earth she didn't mind. She heard the parents telling them to leave her alone, but her seemingly bottomless tin of cookies, which she kept beside her seat on the front porch, always seemed to win out.
She baked them herself. Not every day, but nearly. Chocolate chip. Snickerdoodles. Sugar cookies.
Never peanut butter, though. Dana from across the street had an allergy.
Dana was kind, bringing over school projects to show off every weekday and interesting rocks and bugs over the weekends. It was a Thursday when she bro
