Erika shaves her head late Sunday evening. Thick black ringlets clog the sink. Dust the floor. Curl against one another like fists. Erika feels neither heavier nor lighter minus the hair. But she’s worked in the dreary office for six months and needs to confirm the gnawing suspicion that her coworkers are all assholes. As …
He was still waiting, long after the funeral director had left. A shadow of a man sitting at the furthest pew from the altar. Mrs Martin came in late to help with the wedding that day and nervously asked if they should tell him to leave. Politely, of course. Father Edward looked shocked, shook his …
Back then, I didn’t notice things. And I didn’t take them personally. The cracked brown linoleum. The china cabinet filled with gimcrack treasures. The strip of ink-black mildew under the shower door. I just didn’t care. Now that I’m a bothered bitch, an insufferable New Age overthinker, I wonder if that shitscape of curated cheapness …
The way she remembers it can’t be the way it happened, but it’s the way it creeps into her dreams, soundless and in filtered blue-green light. She floats, anchored by one silver anklet her mother brought back from India before she was born, wafting back and forth in a tiny slice of the bay, hair …
When my father was fifty-one, he had a son, Christopher, with his much younger second wife Amanda. Chris got everything my sister and I didn’t have: private school, saxophone lessons, and, worst of all, our father’s devotion. At one point Dad even coached Chris’s soccer team, which enraged me; I’d vented by joking that Dad …
What if your mother was the woman next door, who has dinner ready at six for her kids, who doesn’t have to call them home, to tell them she has lamb chops for tea because they all have Magic Roundabout watches, and you can smell the chops for miles, and what if you were one …
What if Your Mother was the Woman Next Door? by Rosaleen Lynch Read More »
Precocious children start changing around the age of eight or nine. You’ll see first tufts of fur emerge as their limbs begin to lengthen, as bodies stretch and grow. Stroke their sleeping heads and kiss them goodnight, inhale the sweet scent of childhood while it lasts. For most, the changes really begin to take hold …
The final curve of a sweeping staircase, rubble and debris littering each step. An empty room, no footprints but mine in the muck that covers the floor. The scattered corpses of furniture; table cracked down the middle, couch with its seat torn and innards spilling out. Then, under the stairs, a baby grand piano – …
Once googling people became possible, I googled him every couple of years or so, in odd idle moments, or at times when I was about to undergo, or had just undergone, life-changes such as moving to a new city or getting a new job or breaking up with my partner. His name, it turned out, …
I can never tell when a leech bites because Ma doesn’t flinch. “’Tis no bother, Bridget. My old skin’s tough enough!” She laughs loudly then, but it’s not quite real. Hollow, like the little keg that swings at her waist as she wades through the rush-choked ponds. I have a keg too, to be helpful. …
Three Spokes to the Wheel by Christine Collinson Read More »
Suppose this man with his sovereign ring doesn’t punch you square in the face, and the bridge of your nose—pierced only Wednesday on a whim for your twentieth birthday—doesn’t pop like a champagne cork, your blood Jackson Pollock the ground. Suppose you’ve not burst from the bar onto Clapham High Street, like a Catherine Wheel …
You are not scared of the dark – your eyes have grown accustomed to it, to night’s cloaking and masking, its unsteadying of day’s clichés, day’s commonplace shapes and sounds and songs monotonous. You are not scared of the dark; you comply with its growing fascination with form, its gradual dissolution of colour, draining all …
The Making of the Ink: the first mark by Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou Read More »