[Emma Healey is the creator and curator of The Incongruous Quarterly. She is a very gifted writer, gifted with vision and voice. But in the sense that what we work extremely hard for can seem like gifts to those just meeting us for the first time. Please enjoy, I certainly am.]

CBC - "National Research Council Time Signal"

In the end we elected our friend Jeff prime minister. To be honest we were just all so tired, so bored with the fucking around, and Jeff seemed like the best option, it was April. Could you blame us? (Answer: No you could not.) Things were desparate, in those days. The smell of everything reminded us of hair gel, even cats, and the skin around our eyes was pool-deeper and gradient. We undertipped constantly and were stealing our neighbours' wireless without guilt or apology. Our faces gave off this pale, sickly glow and in motion in groups we looked like a school of dying squid, but resigned more. You could tell time by us and not the good kind. The steady lurching. We felt stuck under glass, there were other things in our lives that needed looking after; our boyfriends sent us ellipsis-heavy text messages asking when we thought we'd be home and our wives were DVRing shows we had never even heard of. The season was coming, outside, even in our shoulders you could feel it, and Jeff had the best jeans and interpersonal skills of any of us. It seems obvious, now. When we had dreams they were anxious and posture-mangling: podiums, compact fluorescents, reasonably paced train crashings, all achingly lucid and bilingual. Coffee - coffee - was no longer a thing that we liked but a thing where even the name of it made us throw up, totally instantly, regardless. When we kissed (if we kissed) it made sounds like the CBC and we tasted like press release, our parents were quietly worried, if you say the word rhetoric ten times fast it sounds imperative. Jeff has an excellent record collection. Jeff had helped us move three times and once burned all five seasons of The Wire for us, and he didn't correct other people when they mispronounced the names of foreign countries, even though he always knew.

Probably we came on a little strong, our voices pitched maybe too keen but in the end it still worked, we could see it even then, that first day in the kitchen with all our materials spread out across the table and Jeff nodding, Jeff-like, into the afternoon. We come prepared, always. We felt clean all the way to our nerve endings. Hope had renewed us. We wanted to sing. Even when we went into his room to count his sweaters we already knew, while he stood in the doorway with his arms crossed, his eyebrows a little bit raised that way he has, watching us. We felt around in the closet but already we were imagining what it would be like to hold hands with girls we didn't even really know, to teach our children to skateboard, to sleep in until 11, to make nachos for dinner and enact policy reform with a swift, stunning grace, to wear good shoes again. Jeff pushed into the doorframe a bit and asked us if we wanted coffee. We politely declined. When Jeff speaks you feel comforted but also like you're ready for something you weren't previously ready for. Outside, spring was petitioning the neighbourhood. We lost count and it didn't even matter. We'd already won.

Sonny and the Sunsets - "Too Young to Burn"

(image by Caroline)