Category: Author’s Alley
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The Shift
It happened over soup. She’d been having lunch alone at the counter of the small Japanese place on Wren Street, as she did on Tuesdays, and he’d been brought by a colleague, and the only available seat was beside her. She knew him. Not personally — professionally. He was the director her agency reported to, the one…
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After Everything
She started yoga at fifty-three because her knees hurt and her doctor said it was that or swimming. She had always hated swimming. The instructor was not what she expected. She had expected a twenty-two-year-old. He was fifty-something with grey in his hair and moved with the ease of a body that had been paid…
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The Long Way Back
They met on the worst night of her life. She was sitting on the kerb outside the hospital at 3 a.m. because the corridor was too full and the night was too long and she needed to breathe. He was sitting on the same kerb because his father was in surgery and he also needed…
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His Hands
She noticed his hands first. Not in a remarkable way — she wasn’t the kind of woman who catalogued men — but he was kneading bread at the demonstration counter of the cookery class and his hands moved with such total confidence that she found herself watching, forgetting to take notes. She’d come to the class because her daughter…
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Things I Thought Would Happen When I Became an Author (And What Actually Happened)
When I decided to become an author, I had a very clear vision of how things would go. It was elegant. Effortless. Slightly cinematic. I would write a book. People would read it. They would love it. And then, naturally, my life would transform into a quiet montage of coffee, creativity, and passive income. Simple.…
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Witchcraft, Romance, and Healing: Why These Stories Matter More Than You Think
On the surface, it looks simple. Witchcraft. Romance. A little magic, a little tension, a little escape. Easy. But the reason these stories stay with people has very little to do with spells or love scenes. It has to do with permission. Magic Is Just the Language Witchcraft, in fiction, isn’t really about rituals or…
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What the Storm Left
The storm knocked out the road and she was stuck at the farmhouse B&B for an extra two days with four strangers and the owner’s elderly dog. One of the strangers was a man named Alex who had been walking a long-distance trail alone and seemed the most at peace with the delay. She found…
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Practice
“You need to practice,” her therapist said. What her therapist meant was: you need to let people in, in small ways, as practice for the large ways. You need to stop treating every relationship like a performance review. She tried it at a yoga class, of all places, where she helped the man on the…
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The Widow’s Garden
She hadn’t meant to plant anything that year. She’d meant to sell the house. But April arrived and the garden looked the way it had when he was alive and she found herself on her knees in the mud with a trowel, not because she’d decided to, but because her body had gone there while…
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Somewhere He Could Reach
The thing about wanting someone you can’t have is that it lives somewhere specific — not in the mind, not where you can argue with it, but lower, somewhere in the chest, just off-centre, somewhere unreasonable. That was where he kept Vera. Four years of friendship. Four years of being exactly what she needed, which was: reliable,…
Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 