Property

A spring day in a gentrifying neighbourhood begins unremarkably enough; by evening someone has died.

Nat, a middle-aged queer mother of two, feigns normalcy as she worries about her taciturn, loner son locked in his room. Her friend Maddy, a failed actress and fellow parent, frets over her missed opportunities and considers leaving her marriage. Next door, Ilya, a young construction worker, struggles to renovate a fixer-upper, but a buried stream threatens to flood the basement. An old woman eyes the street through the gap in her curtains. A lonely man wanders.

As the troubled residents stumble through their errands, navigating the thorniness of class and privilege, of queer respectability and friendship in an overstretched city, each seemingly inconsequential exchange tightens in around the neighbourhood, until finally tragedy strikes, leaving it forever changed.

Kate Cayley has previously published two short story collections and three collections of poetry, and her plays have been performed in Canada, the US, and the UK. She has won the Trillium Book Award, an O. Henry Prize, and the Mitchell Prize for Poetry, and been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, among other awards. Her writing has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Best Canadian Stories, Brick, Electric Literature, Joyland, and The New Quarterly. She lives in Toronto.