Jay Hosking obtained his neuroscience Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, teaching rats how to gamble as a means of studying the neurobiological basis of choice. At the same time, he also completed a creative writing MFA. His short stories have appeared in The Dalhousie Review and Little Fiction, and have been long-listed for the CBC Canada Writes short story competition. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University where he researches decision-making and the human brain. Hosking lives in Vancouver, B.C.

Three Years with the Rat

When a young man’s best friend and sister go missing, he finds a mystery waiting for him in their apartment: a wooden box big enough for a person to crawl inside, a lab rat and a note that says “This is the only way back for us.” Soon the young man embarks on a mission to discover the truth, a pursuit that forces him to question time and space itself, and ultimately toward a perilous confrontation at the very limits of imagination. Three Years with the Rat is simultaneously a mind-twisting mystery that plays with the very nature of time and a story about facing the dangerously destructive forces we all carry within ourselves.