Karen Walker

Karen Walker, profile pic

Biography

Karen is a long-time resident of Cobourg. She began writing short fiction, creative nonfiction, and prose poetry in 2019. Her stories have won or been short-listed in competitions and appear in more than one hundred international print and digital literary journals and anthologies. Karen can be found with her family or in the garden.

Skating

in L’ Esprit Literary Review April 2023

The dad is ice on the lake in the park. Says to his child and the mother of his child he’ll scout for thin spots, dark open water. He skates away. The hard grace of the hockey star he was. Strides stretched longer and longer by sudden fatherhood, a frozen relationship (still no ring), by a preemie. The cold-water walk-up where they’ve lived for eight years. At the end of the lake, he looks back.

Mom? Snow. A snowflake—never the same twice. So the father of her child hurries home after work, leaping the apartment stairs two at a time. May find her crying at a Christmas movie or in a blizzard of her own, doing white powder lines. Other days, there’s a flurry in the kitchen: mashed potatoes and vanilla cupcakes, the rusty old fridge defrosted.

The child is the skates. Thrift store scruffy, a size smaller than she should be. The leather more yellow than white.

But she’s one sharp little blade. Tempered steel, even temperamental this morning when the ice said, “No skating today, honey. Dad’s worked midnights all week.” The mom, shivering, said, “Too cold.”

They went. Warmer on a lake in December than in the apartment after a no.

Starfish bodies aren’t bodies at all

 in National Flash Fiction Day New Zealand 2024 Micro Madness

They’re heads, all head! Brainiacs.
Everything else has disappeared, says star starfish researcher Dr. Darla Seaborne.
Her gran, hating high heels, recalls walking feet vanishing. Hands were next when males said hey baby, no stilettos, no wedding ring. When starfish fronts and backs became flat, Darla’s daddy left for a more voluptuous creature.
A heart can break, so, eventually, it shrivelled.
But why do starfish have five arms?
Seaborne’s latest discovery—males fear odd numbers—will win her The Nobel Prize in Evolution, allow her to crawl the seafloor to Stockholm to accept, and really show her daddy. 

Selected Publications