Rebecca McNutt

To exist as an interpreter of the law, you first have to follow that law yourself. Law is the glue that holds society together. It's flawed, but absolute, and corruption only hinders its progress.

Dreams are just lies that we tell ourselves while we're asleep.

Smile for the camera, pretty little Sydney Tar Ponds.

She is shocked by the rows of thick Plexiglas windows, each equipped with a telephone, each with a prisoner on one side and an outsider on the other. There is a teenage girl chatting with a prisoner who is presumably her father. There__ a married couple talking to their daughter. There__ a woman with a baby in her arms, sobbing into her phone as she begs her husband not to plead guilty for his crimes. Jail is terrifying to Geraldine, not only because it__ a house of criminals but also because it__ a cold slap in the face, a reminder of where she will eventually end up. __ou__e got to stay with me the whole time, Callo! I__ serious, you CANNOT leave me here._____l never,_ Callo vows, but he__ eyeing her strangely. __ust remember which side of the glass you__e on right now, Geraldine.

The prints shop manager, a balding man of about thirty years old, dressed in a plaid work shirt and faded jeans, looked very shocked when he saw the headline text. __ydney Tar Ponds, Is It As Dangerous As People Say? Well,_ he exclaimed, glancing at the front photo, which featured the Sydney Steel Corporation, along with its plumes of orange smog. __ou know, most people your age are really against that mill, as if it__ a disease. We have university students protesting every few weeks or so_ strangely enough, the ones who have parents who rely on that steel mill to pay the bills.___hat about the pollution?_ Wendy questioned, almost accusingly, as if it was his fault. __hat if dangerous chemicals are in the environment?___ey kid, I don__ even work at the mill, never have, but my father, my uncle, their father, cousins, all worked there,_ the prints shop man argued, placing the newspapers in a cardboard box and taping it shut. __hen it comes down to all that __o green_ crap, you have to ask yourself, is it worth risking a person__ income, their job, their family_ their life? I__ not saying you__e wrong, but these newspapers might have a point.

The hardest part of being a Canadian kid is having to color in Nunavut with a crayon in school, hell on earth.

Maybe a holiday miracle will change Mearth__ awful behavior,_ Mandy suggested with optimism.__he only holiday miracle around here is that Mearth hasn__ murdered us both yet,_ said Alecto, lighting another cigarette, his hands shaking erratically. He looked exhausted and terrified, his gray eyes soulless.__o you know what Mearth likes, Alecto?_ Mandy questioned.__egetables, she likes celery a lot, and lettuce,_ Alecto responded in a quiet monotone. __ don__ know what else she likes. I__e never asked her.___ell, she has to like something_ doesn__ everyone?___ot her, Mandy Valems.

Where did the stereotypical image of the reclusive author in a bathrobe and slippers, indulging in vices and spending hours before a typewriter, even come from? I don't know about you, but most writers don't have the luxury of doing any of this. Otherwise we'd have no life experience and nothing to write about, anyway.

Life is not the end, and death is just the beginning...

Alecto, do you think we have fallen from heaven, or do you think we are falling towards it?

Try as you might, you'll never be able to please an environmentalist. You can stop using coal to heat your house, you can stop throwing out bottles and cans, you can have every factory in Canada shut down and you can buy only organic gluten-free non-GMO food, you can give up your favorite station wagon for a weird electric hybrid, you can stop developing film and buy a never-ending cycle of digital cameras, you can give up your job at a refinery or mill, and they'll still get after you for not enjoying yourself while doing so.

What goes up, must come down." Well, Issac Newton's law doesn't apply to the internet. That's what people don't realize. When you put something up, as long as there is an internet there will be that same stuff. When you're a senior citizen, what you uploaded to Facebook at a high school party will still be there. Whatever you upload to the internet, no matter how strong your passwords and security are, guaranteed the government or some advertising corporation will look at what you post someday. The only law that applies to the internet is, "For every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction." Post a photograph and you'll get attention. Post your old scanned Kodak slides and family home movies, you'll get a nostalgia rush and you'll reunite people with better days. But post a bad thing, thinking you can go unnoticed, and you'll never be able to crawl out from underneath it.

There__ a good reason for everything, ain__ there?

You__e such a great liar when you lie to yourself.

We get along like a house on fire these days.

Yeah, you__e right about having entire rooms full of film and photos_ in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage_ I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides_ I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that__ happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs,_ Alecto responded. __eople say that a time machine can__ be invented, but they__e already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world__ first time machines_ The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I__e been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to.

On Wall Street, Clarence was a diamond in a sea of glass, never greedy, never an ambulance-chaser, never the kind of person who deserved to die in the way that he did.

If I hear the phrase "selfie" one more time, I'll have to enroll myself in anger management classes.