She’s building a baby. Scooping the beach with busy hands. Limpet shell eyes, driftwood splinter buzzcut. Seaweed nappy wrapped tight. You stare anywhere but down. Watch a sandpiper in the foam, the pier reaching out in its empty-armed embrace. You taste salt. ‘You don’t like it?’ ‘Sand in my eye,’ you lie. The world wavers …
I carry it everywhere I go, brim-full of loved things. It totes a waterfall on the Isle of Skye, lit with the thinnest crack of sunshine through clouds that lifted late in the day. It is thick with the sound of laughter in different languages: arf arf, hee hee hee, hard to remember where one …
Walking the streets, alone, I notice that it is the old people who now wear the T-shirts of my analog youth, and I can only come to the conclusion that what was my youth was theirs as well, and am left to wonder, on occasion, and aloud, how the fuck did this happen? I tell …
Swallow – new beginnings He told her he created sculptures from the tiny bones of birds. A skeletal artist with downy hair manipulating goldcrest-sized tweezers. She told him he could stroke her avian-like cheekbones. Trace her fine framework with his claw-clasp fingers. Mandarin duck – harmony He told her their love was bone-deep. Birds of …
Bad to the Bone: A Guide to Ornithology Feng Shui by Cheryl Markosky Read More »
With innocent abandon, Angela, one-year-old, plays with her pizza while Eli disappears his fourth slice in three bites, washing down the bolus of bread and cheese with undiluted vodka, making a show of wincing manfully at the burn. Miranda won’t be home from the hospital until morning. It’s been weeks since she’s worked an overnight …
At twelve, I spend most of my time at Helen’s, sunk in a stained leather sofa, the lounge lit by a crack in the curtains drawn against daylight; the blue shaft of second-hand smoke from her mother like a cinema projector. We’re watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Exorcist. Her mother lets …
He comes into the kitchen with blood on his hand, forearm, elbow. A deep cut, down to the bone, is snagged across his index, middle, third finger. Unclean. Serrated. Right where the inside of the knuckles bend. He shuffles to the sink, boots smearing car grease on the tiles. The tap judders as he twists it, and he …
You reached for my hand as we stepped onto the shingle. The tide was out and the beach was a moonscape of wrinkled rocks. Under the overcast sky the sea glimmered like pearl, and two tankers lingered silently on the horizon. Perpendicular to the shore, lines of tree trunks had been planted to stop …
Working late tonight. Don’t need dinner. Don’t wait up x Hera’s phone was already in her hand when the text from Bruce popped up. She held onto the double-decker bus railing with one hand, the phone with the other, and stared at it. It had been going on for months, and it was getting worse. …
She throws the hand-painted gravy boat at him. It hits the door frame and shatters. He shouts, I wasn’t with any damned librarian. They held me late at the docks, a shipment of oysters. Ask anyone, ask Mr. Lambert for God’s sake. He leans against the folding table. Even in this moment she is breathless, …
The floor was thin muck, tacky with sweet liquor and sweat. It was dark and the party was polka dots. Your favourite song played, and I remember, because you pulled me close, and shot me That Look. Your eyes gave me vertigo and I was dizzy on your skin. Every molecule of the air …
Kind, understanding eyes are unbearable when you don’t want to be understood. Or do you? Bad things happen to good people, but there’s no point in talking when there’s no point in being. There’s been no you left—not for years. And yet you tell. You step back into that sweltering Saturday morning that killed you …