You’ve always wanted it, haven’t you? To move with vacancy. A smile like you’re just about to bite an apple. That girl-next-door quality. You’ve always wanted it. The day she moves in, you see her through the gap in your curtain and you exhale slowly; she has it. It’s there in all the ways …
The elevator is between the twenty-first and the twenty-second floor when the cable snaps, so the passengers have some time to share their life stories before they hit the ground. ‘I married too young,’ says the woman with the red hair and the butter-soft gaze and the lapel badge which reads ‘Baby on Board’. ‘I …
My eyes fix upon Mrs Marshall, immaculate in a starched apron, as she prepares to begin the demonstration. Cherries, heaped on the bench before her, gleam in the light from the high windows. Bowls, glasses, and spoons await, pristine and neat. My breathing stills as she wipes her hands and announces the start of the recipe. …
He said he was living in his parents’ one-room garage until he could afford his own place, that he’d decked it out like a scene from a 70s movie: red lava lamp in the corner, posters of trippy fractals on the walls, a silkscreen of Hendrix on the ceiling, shag rug on the floor in …
The second-hand Super Sindy Home arrives in our frigid, old house as abruptly as anything arrives when one person wants rid of it, and another wants something for free. ‘Where do you want it?’ my father asks my mother, as if it was not him who had been talked into taking it from a colleague …
The Lion, the Witch and the Super Sindy Home by Charlotte Turnbull Read More »
Toby fired jagged grit into the pond. Watched ripples do the hokey-cokey. Grandad’s precious carp scattered with every splash. Idiots came back though, too stupid to realise it wasn’t food he was shooting at them. Their long strong bodies moved like snakes. Snakes with insect wings flapping. Tissue-paper delicate. Their scales flared against the mucky …
I remember the smoke that night, how it blew across the heaving hillside that rose like a fist in the dark to where we watched from the far shore, far enough away to be safe, but close enough so we could say “we were there” on Monday morning on the school bus, how we listened …
Monogamy is buying a gun and watching your lover swallow all the bullets. This is what Leigh Chadwick thinks as she lies in bed, listening to the thunder outside her window. It’s night, late enough to almost be called morning. A streak of light cracks through the blinds. Whenever Leigh Chadwick sees lightning, she imagines …
I was the one who welcomed her to my master’s home, and the moment I opened the great oak door I realised that none of our lives would ever be the same. She met my eye for only a second, then looked down, her cheeks colouring, as if I might think she didn’t deserve to …
The devil went down to London to bargain for a human heart. Now the devil may be made up of smoke, deep pressed malice and spite and greed, and his own heart may be quite different to our own, but he still needs the uncorrupted beat of the human organ to feed the hungers of …
In the school cafeteria at lunchtime, hungry mouths of lickspittle children lick salty chip-fingers and belch like milk-drunk babies in each other’s faces. Douglas’s table is empty, his belly too. He stares into the space between the formica tabletop and the linoleum floor, tries to disappear. The other kids call him names, they avoid him …
When I was three, maybe four years old my mom used to sing a Mitch Miller tune at bedtime. My sisters and I would march up the stairs, chirp along with the chorus, and flop into our beds as the song ended: Be kind to your web-footed friendsFor a duck may be somebody‘s mother,Be kind …